“Do we have any other members of the audience that have an extra million dollars laying around that might help us out?” A Jefferson County commissioner posed that question at the end of the March 14 budget work session, just after the Commission had spent several hours cutting the budget.
I had been trying to follow the somewhat chaotic budget discussions all morning. Towards the end of the session, I realized that the budget documents in front of the commissioners were undercounting next year’s projected revenues by over $1 million. I shared my suspicion about the missing revenue with the County Clerk, who interrupted the meeting to suggest I share what I found. Steve Stolipher, the Commission president, remarked that if I had something to say I should step up to the microphone and say it. So I did. About 10 minutes later the county’s accountant announced the budget had swung from an $800,000 deficit to a $300,000 surplus.
One item the commissioners skipped over several times was the lack of any cost-of-living-allowance (COLA) or merit pay increases for any of the county’s employees. They continued to avoid the pay raise issue at the next meetings where they added a few more expense items back into the budget. When they voted to approve the budget on March 21, employee pay raises were still set to zero, but the commissioners seemed quite pleased that they had “balanced” the budget. I couldn’t help but recall author George Orwell’s words in the novel Animal Farm — “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
By Steve Pearson