Talk about setting yourself up for failure, you knew the 2.9% increase was too good to be true. Check out some of these numbers!
ONE TIME MONEY
Using one time money in the budget to make it balance is dangerous, cuz while it might work for this year, it doubles the troubles in the following year. I’ve heard it said that the county always does this, but the numbers don’t really show that, check out the trend in use of one time moneys.
2002 – $120,000 from sale of land.
2003 – $120,000 from sale of land
2004 – $310,000 from sale of land
2005 – $500,000 from sale of property
2006 – $1,700,000 from sale of land and $300,000 from a grant
2007 – $1,825,000 from sale of land
2008 – $4,237,900 from sales of land, TIF ($1,2262,000) and tower relocation ($135,900)
2009 – $6,897,546 from sales, ATC impact fee ($985,000) and Solid Waste Transfer ($2,322,546)
2010 – $7,120,000 from sales and ATC impact fee ($5,470,000)
2011 – $4,274,600 ATC impact fees
What happens when there aren’t sales to be made and TIF and ATC funds?
RAINY DAY FUND
Also of interest . . . here’s how the rainy day fund has been doing over the past few years:
2000
Budgeted: 6,891,398
Actual: 4,718,733
2001
Budgeted: 7,267,042
Actual: 10,869,805
2002
Budgeted: 8,601,309
Actual: 8,982,738
2003
Budgeted: 8,890,117
Actual: 12,097,535
2004
Budgeted: 8,916,485
Actual: 17,377,310
2005
Budgeted: 9,236,860
Actual: 15,368,507
2006
Budgeted: 9,525,939
Actual: 15,491,062
2007
Budgeted: 9,867,184
Actual: 12,674,955
2008
Budgeted: 10,243,309
Actual: 4,149,446
2009
Budgeted: 10,467,887
Actual: (2,711,662)
2010
Budgeted: 2,000,000
Actual: (5,809,504) projected, tho I’m not sure if that was before or after the sales tax projections that seemed to be a little bit of good news.
So, how an you only raise taxes 2.9% when the county has a negative rainy day fund? Seems irresponsible. The county budget is a bit of a mystery to me, and its hard to get information . . . but I can’t see how this makes any sense and it seems the county board and next County Executive are going to have a mess to clean up.
