While the city struggles to hammer out a balanced budget before next week, the county is all set for the start of the fiscal year July 1.
The Vance Board of Commissioners approved the 2005-06 budget at a special meeting Tuesday evening. (According to The Daily Dispatch, Deborah Brown was the lone voice of dissent on a 6-1 vote.)
The final $46.3 million budget is essentially the same as what County Manager Jerry Ayscue proposed May 26.
The main difference is that the property tax rate is 92 cents per $100 valuation, a 2-cent rise, instead of the 93 cents Ayscue originally sought. The county manager said a lower quote for worker’s compensation insurance accounted for most of the savings necessary to lower the tax increase; the rest of the improved financial picture came from reworked revenue estimates and updated information. Each penny on the property tax is expected to produce about $187,000.
The other major revenue adjustment is in the annual solid waste fee, which is rising from $75 to $90 per household. That means the owner of a $100,000 Vance house will pay a total of $35 more in the coming fiscal year: $20 in property taxes and $15 in sanitation fees. That homeowner’s total commitment to the county for sanitation and property taxes is $1,010.
The fire tax for houses outside Henderson remains 3 cents per $100 of property value, or an additional $30 for that theoretical $100,000 house.
The entire budget process for the county was quick and as painless as possible in tight fiscal times involving a tax increase. The commissioners needed only a couple of meetings to review Ayscue’s proposal. They endorsed his refiguring the budget with a 2-cent tax increase after the lower worker’s comp figure came in, and they didn’t make changes to his spending plans.
About 10 people addressed the commissioners during the public hearing on the budget June 6, and no county department heads took advantage of an opportunity to appeal their proposed funding levels last week.
The budget includes two new sheriff’s deputies starting in January and a new clerical position for the Sheriff’s Office in February. Sheriff R. Thomas Breedlove said in a recent interview that the clerical position will free his detectives to spend more time investigating instead of filling out paperwork; he said the effect will be the equivalent of hiring two more detectives.
Among issues in the news, the county budget for the H. Leslie Perry Memorial Library is $300,000, $50,000 more than in the current fiscal year to reflect two months in the new building next spring. Ayscue did not change the amount he proposed May 26, despite a plea from Tem Blackburn on behalf of the library’s board of trustees to add roughly $30,000 to hire a technology expert immediately.
It’s not clear whether the county will appropriate the full $300,000 if the city doesn’t increase its library funding. City Manager Eric Williams talked Tuesday about spending $277,000 on the library, up from the $253,208 he proposed last month.
The county budget also features a $410,000 increase from the Medicaid spending approved a year ago, to $3.15 million. That’s only about $109,000 more than the revised amount the commissioners approved for Medicaid this month to handle cost overruns. Medicaid consumes about 17 cents of the 92-cent property tax.
New York is the only state besides North Carolina that requires counties to contribute to the costs of the federal-state health plan for the poor, and New York is phasing out the county share, which hits poorer counties disproportionately hard. A similar proposal has stalled in the North Carolina General Assembly.