Hays Post
The Ellis County Commission began the early stages of the 2019 budgeting process at Monday’s commission meeting with a look at a five-year outlook.
According to County Administrator Phillip Smith-Hanes, the county will start 2018 with an additional $350,000 but is projected to spend $3 million dollars more that it brings in in 2019.
Smith-Hanes said the reason for the increase is transfers to various funds — another $490,000 will go toward building projects and $280,000 is for advanced repayment of a lease purchase agreement.
All three are one-time expenditures and make up about $2.5 million of the additional spending. They could also be cut to help balance the budget.
The county also could have raised another $150,000 under the tax lid if the commission has raised the mill levy.
Smith-Hanes also, with the help of department heads, laid out a five-year projection that showed the county could be facing a projected deficit of $11 million in five years.
The budget for 2019 is balanced, but the projections are based on assumptions and Smith-Hanes said it’s hard to project five years in the future.
“The farther out you go, the less true those assumptions are likely to be,” said Smith-Hanes.
The county’s budget is affected by a number of different factors. Those include, on the expenditure side: salary and benefits, health insurance costs, the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System, and department spending.
Revenues are also hard to predict, he said. Currently, the tax lid is capped at 1.4 percent and property tax is the number that has the greatest effect.
Smith-Hanes showed that a slight change in any of the expenditures or revenues it can change the bottom line dramatically.
“It’s really difficult to construct a set of scenarios that gets us back into a positive position for an ongoing basis,” he said.
Smith-Hanes said the presentation was a cautionary tale and not a “crisis.”
The commission will continue working on the budgets for 2019 and beyond later this year.
In other business, the Commission Chair Dean Haselhorst read a proclamation declaring February as teen dating violence awareness month in Ellis County.
The commission also honored employees for years of services and had an executive session with EMS Director Kerry McCue to discuss rates of pay for non-elected personnel.