By John Estridge
For the past several years when Union County Council members got together for a budget workshop, to plan out the following year’s budget, there was a lot of anguish.
Union County has watched its revenues decrease and expenses increase to the point, a few years ago, there was talk of sending some of the services to other counties.
But this year the atmosphere within the small meeting room was much better as the council members met on Thursday morning, September 17. There were two large monetary events, which occurred in the weeks leading up to the budget meetings.
Union County Commissioners approved new vendors for the health insurance contract and the ambulance service contract. The county saved $100,000 per year on the former and $30,000 per year on the latter.
Union County Auditor Cheryl Begley told council members they needed to carve $211,000 out of the budget to have a balanced budget.
Usually, council members go line by line through each and every budget, cutting $500 here, $200 there and sometimes $1,000 another place. However, this year the department heads and elected officials did such a good job of cutting their own costs, there was no “fat” to cut.
Thus, council members decided to cut all of the requested raises from the budget as well as requests for new employees.
By doing that, at the end of 90 minutes of work, council members cut $257,411, counting the $130,000 cut from the budget by the commissioners. Wanting to leave a little wiggle room in the 2021 budget, Begley suggested council had about $35,000 to work with.
Councilmen Jim Hensley and Chris Rosenberger suggested a $500 raise for full-time employees and $250 increase for part-time employees. However, there is one item that is still unknown: if the Public Safety Income Tax will be increased by 0.5 percent.
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Because of that, council will hold a special meeting at 9 a.m., Thursday, September 24, to vote on the possible income tax increase and ostensibly also discuss at that time possible pay increases for the county employees.