On Tuesday, the first of two days of budget hearings began at 8 a.m. The hearings are effectively a work session where the public can watch or attend, but there is not time set aside for public comment or input. The meetings are being broadcast live and on demand with links available each day at facebook.com/HamCoIndiana. Tuesday’s hearings are available for streaming at youtu.be/AgWGbQHFB_E.
The Reporter spoke with County Council Member At-Large Sue Maki and County Council District 4 Member Ken Alexander about the first day of hearings.
According to Maki, the first day was smooth and non-confrontational.
Maki
“The trend we heard from department heads and elected officials in charge of departments was that quality staff is hard to get,” Maki told The Reporter. “If they have an opening or are looking ahead planning for retirement for some of their staff, they need to be able to find, train and retain good employees. That was the biggest issue I took away from it. But any industry right now has that issue.”
According to Alexander, this is not a government issue, but one for all employers in the current economy.
“This is not an anomaly to government,” Alexander said. “Everywhere around there is the opportunity to go make money in the same industry, just with a different company. We as a government are not just competing with other governing bodies, we are competing against the private sector. The private sector can be nimble. It can make changes. They don’t have to go to a budget hearing to come up with how much they are going to pay someone, they make the change and bring on the people and move on and change the cost of their product. We’re different. So there are challenges we have to deal with.”
Alexander
Alexander pointed to County Clerk Kathy Williams as someone who has already been working on plans to face the issue of employee succession. According to Alexander, she has already come to a previous council meeting to discuss the number of soon-to-be-retirees leaving her department and her concerns for getting new people in place and trained in a timely manner.
The Parks Department was, according to Maki, asking for the largest increase in staff. They are requesting money for four new full-time maintenance personnel.
“The Parks Department had to do a cut in staff back in 2010 as a result of the 2008 recession,” Maki said. “They had a reduction of staff then and they have not added any maintenance staff since then. They are basically trying to make themselves whole to where they were over 10 years ago. We asked them to go back and look at what kind of outsourcing of the maintenance of the park could be done, so it would not be full-time staff. But the cost of that might end up being more than having employees do it because the landscape industry as a whole is hurting for workers and paying high rates for their employees, therefore we might not be any better off than doing it ourselves.”
Other than staffing concerns, another issue at Tuesday’s hearing was the potential for a $4.6 million income tax revenue shortfall for the 2022 budget.
“We started the meeting with a presentation by our financial consultant, Mike Reuter, who had conservative estimates of what our local income tax revenues will be as released by the state, but he was waiting for final figures to verify what he was estimating,” Maki told The Reporter. “After he left, he called our council president over lunch because he was able to find out from the state that our revenues will be $4.6 million less than what his conservative estimate was. So we are looking at things a little bit more closely because we have to account for that much less revenue in 2022. There are things we can do to adjust, but no decisions have been made. We are still in the middle of it.”
Alexander told The Reporter part of the shortfall may be a sort of hidden state penalty for receiving COVID-19 relief money in the form of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) disbursements.
“We get our revenue from many different sources,” Alexander said. “Revenues outside of local income tax were up. When you look at thing like real estate going up by 6.5 percent in assessed values, we are actually still – I believe – trending very positively. This [state tax revenue reduction] has obviously caught us all off guard and I think without understanding exactly how this came to be, I have made some phone calls and my understanding is that it could be tied to the ARPA money that we got. That distribution may be being used against us. But I am not sure. I want to wait for Mike Reuter to get back with us and say, ‘This is how it is going to impact us.’ We have already mapped out the strategies that will allow us to not make huge, impactful changes.”
Alexander explained that the county’s rainy-day fund could easily absorb this, but council members are also working to be fiscally prudent and make changes where needed.
“I think the department heads did a very great job of putting together their plans and trying to stick to what we want to achieve, which is having a fixed tax rate that doesn’t go up,” Alexander said.
Reuter will present a revision to the fiscal plan at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday morning with adjustments for the income tax revenue shortfall.
After the work session hearings, the final budget will be adopted in a public hearing, with public comments available this fall.