The budget battle in Charles County is far from over, and it’s beginning to look increasingly evident that the process will stretch well into May. The biggest impacts so far appear to be no step increases in pay for county employees and an imminent tax increase.
Charles County Finance Director David Eicholtz admitted Tuesday, April 29 that with the commissioners setting May 20 as the date to set the Constant Yield Tax Rate, the county’s budget won’t be finalized until that number is known, pushing the earlier proposed date of May 6 for finalization back 14 days.
Meanwhile, as they go through one budget work session after another, county leaders keep looking for ways to find funding sources not previously discussed.
When Commissioner Ken Robinson discovered a surplus of money in the Cable TV Access/I-Net Fund, he pounced on it immediately.
“That’s a lot of money,” he noted.
“I know it looks like an easy thing to say, ‘Don’t do these projects,’ ” Eicholtz said, “but it’s not that simple.
“We said back in March at the beginning of these work sessions that Fiscal Year 2015 was going to be a very challenging year and it certainly has been,” he added. “The baseline budget doesn’t provide anything new. It’s not what everybody wants or asks for.”
Eicholtz said the finance office has presented several options to the commissioners for consideration of how they might balance the budget, not the least of which is a tax increase.
“We don’t like to come in and say we want to raise taxes, but we’re left few options,” Eicholtz said. “We won’t know how much tax revenue we can accrue until September and even then, that is not the reconciled amount for that tax year. We won’t know that until November, when we get final reconciliation.”
“We’re projecting the worst case scenario here,” Robinson suggested.
“We’re projecting what we believe will be the most realistic case,” Eicholtz said. “We don’t know exactly what the number is, because those revenues haven’t come in yet.”
“Educate us once again bout the difference between flatline and baseline budget,” Commissioner Debra Davis said.
“If you went with the flat line budget you would be increasing your baseline budget by $40 million,” Eicholtz said.
Eicholtz added that assertions were made during the April 23 public hearing that the county did not fund a promised $10 million to the Board of Education for the new St. Charles High School, but he added there was a very good reason for that.
“The school will only have three grades the first year,” he said. “That allowed us to only have to allocate $7.7 for those three grades. Next year, another fourth grade will be added to your operating budget.”
Eicholtz pointed out yet another peril facing the county in the future.
“We are out of reserves for snow removal and if we have another harsh winter we would start to tap into the fund balance reserve and the effect of that, while it is not the worst thing in the world, you have to put it into your budget for next year. We don’t use one-time money for operating costs,” he added. “This budget does cause a little bit of a
