The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Not everyone happy to see a bigger budget
After a year of surprising ups and expected downs, Gunnison County has finished its annual march through the budgeting process to mixed reviews. While the number of foreclosures in the county continues to rise and jobs become increasingly scarce, not everyone is happy to see an increase in the amount of county spending.
The county will spend millions more dollars next year than it spent in 2010, while there is no shortage of indicators around the valley that the economy isn’t keeping pace. But the spike in spending can primarily be traced to the county’s capital expenditures that increased more than 1,500 percent in the last 12 months.
The money the county had been saving for the construction of a jail and public works facility—$2.5 million at the end of 2010—is gone and the costs of the two projects have pushed the capital expenditures line item in the budget up by more than $13 million.
At the same time the county’s fixed costs like insurance, workers compensation costs, and fuel for the county fleet will all likely rise. The county’s health insurance costs went up 7 percent for 2011, the biggest increase in nine years.
On top of that, most of the one-time money the county got last year from the federal stimulus program has all but gone away.
The Gunnison Board of County Commissioners on Tuesday, December 14 passed a resolution adopting the county mil levy that went up to 10.24 from 9.546 last year.
County finance director Linda Nienheuser says that if the assessed value goes down next year and the amount of services the county residents require stays the same, the county could legally raise the mil levy above 17 mils, although the county hasn’t chosen to assess the full amount in a very long time.
But that doesn’t make county resident Joe Matyk feel much better. Matyk attended a public hearing on the county’s proposed 2011 budget on Tuesday, December 7 to raise some big-picture questions about the county’s growing budget, at a time when budgets on an individual level are shrinking to reflect the economic realities around them, and he was surprised that he was the only one to speak out.
“As a small business owner, my ability to survive depends on my ability to craft a budget that’s mindful of current market conditions and that’s what I see as missing here in this process,” says Matyk, who has worked in real estate and development in Colorado for nearly 30 years. “It’s not really mindful of what’s going on in the community.”
Watching the process unfold this year has frustrated the former county commissioner candidate, who thinks we could all use a little less government, assuming the cost to the taxpayers follows suit.
“There’s a disconnect between what these guys are doing and what the reality is out here in the county,” Matyk says. “The election hasn’t changed anything in their minds.”
His concern is that the government—from federal to local—is just too big for citizens to afford. The line item that caught his attention at the public hearing was the one showing that personnel costs had increased by $1.1 million over 2009.
And while he sees the increase in health insurance costs eating up some of that increase in cost, he can’t see how the entire increase has gone that way.
Taking a look at the county’s budget over the last five years, the amount of net budgeted expenditures has gone up consistently from anywhere between less than a percent in 2007 to more than 10 percent in 2010.
But Nienheuser cautions against judging the merits of the budget after only seeing the bottom line. Considering the money being committed to the construction of the county’s capital projects, she says the county’s budget has actually gotten smaller.
Many county departments will be pulling back spending this coming year. The county’s budgeted appropriations for Public Works, the Conservation Trust, the Housing Authority, the Local Marketing District and the Gunnison Valley Transportation Authority all saw reductions of more than 10 percent.
For Matyk, there are just too many county departments being funded by taxpayers; the increase in personnel costs brings the issue to the forefront. In the last five years, the salary of the county manager position has gone up by more than $50,000. In the same period of time the budget for the board of county commissioners has increased from just over $330,000 to a budgeted $447,801.
“Here’s where I see the disconnect,” Matyk says. “These guys are raising their pay [or expenses] in what is arguably the greatest recession since the Great Depression.”
Amidst the financial fallout of a weak economy, Nienheuser can still accentuate the positive: sales tax dropped by a half percent below the amount collected last year, which is better than the expected 2 percent drop.
At the same time revenues are going down and expenditures are going up, the county has been able to maintain, or increase, its fund balance and the reserves it rests on in tough times. The projected fund balance has also stayed well above 20 percent of total operational expenditures.
For those, and other, reasons, Matyk believes that the county employees feel like they’re being good stewards of the taxpayers’ money. “I feel like our county people are more cognizant of the fact that the funding from the taxpayers is not unlimited,” but that there are just too many services being offered by the county.
Some of those services, like community planning, have continued to grow even as the number of building permits and project inspections it oversees has shrunk alongside the economy.
“I think as taxpayers, we’re getting exactly what we voted for and what we’re paying for,” Matyk continued. “We’re getting value for our money—I just think we’re spending too much money and we have too much government. I think we could all get by with a little less government.”
But the county isn’t reducing its services next year and the commissioners approved a resolution adopting the budget as presented. A resolution adopting the county mil levy will get a final look at a regular meeting December 21.
