County Crunches the Numbers to Balance New Budget

Fayette County Commissioners Court presented a new 2023 County Budget last week that shaved the deficit they initially proposed last month.

The budget they proposed three weeks ago included a $270,000 spending deficit. Since then, County Auditor Cindy Havelka said she worked with several departments to cut proposed expenses. The County also discovered some revenues that were missing in the initial budget.

The new balanced budget includes $28,355,303.30 in expenses and revenues of $28,507,224.44, leaving a surplus of about $151,921.

Commissioners held a public hearing on the budget at a meeting Thursday, Aug. 25. County Judge Joe Weber said some major expenses in next year’s budget includes a five percent raise for county employees, new equipment for the Sheriff’s Office, expansion of the County’s EMS services and funds for the skyrocketing cost of fuel, gravel and other road and bridge maintenance supplies.

Commissioners propose lowering the County’s property tax rate from $0.464 per $100 to $0.44219 However, the proposed budget will raise taxes by 14.82 percent due to increasing property values in the County.

“Our property appraisals drove a lot of things up,” Weber said at the Aug. 25 meeting. “It increases our revenues. But it’s also going to increase people’s taxes, but, I think, fairly and moderately.” 

The budget will raise taxes by $2,424,752 million over last year. Only about $341,000 of that comes from new construction. The remainder, more than $2 million, comes from the rising appraisals

Weber said the County does not want to cut services.

“It’s been particularly difficult in the last couple of years to project revenues and expenses with COVID and the economic situation we find ourselves in now - inflation and costs going up for everything,” Weber said.

Weber addressed the criticism some have raised over the Commissioners’ decision to give employees and elected officials a five percent pay raise.

“People may not be happy with that,” Weber said. “But we have great services in this County, and we have great people working for this County. We are very much in line with other counties, maybe even a little bit on the lower end. I think our County employees truly deserve that. And elected officials? I don’t know, is five percent too much? It’s better than the 40 percent that the Austin City Council is asking for. We’re trying to hold elected officials pretty much close to the County employees.”

Pct. 1 Commissioner Jason McBroom said he and the other commissioners scrutinized everything line item in the budget

Pct. 3 Commissioner Harvey Berckenhoff said he believed all departments planned conservatively with budget requests for next year

“I don’t see inflation giving us a break in the next year or two,” Berckenhoff said.

Pct. 4 Commissioner Drew Brossmann noted the number of people moving to Fayette County

“There’s one reason why they’re coming here, it’s the good services that Fayette County offers them,” Brossmann said. “With the schools, with the Sheriff’s Office, the EMS, all the services that the road and bridge (departments) do. We want to make sure we keep that going.

Besides property taxes, the County also receives sales tax revenue The County does not directly collect sales taxes. Rather, the Texas Comptroller’s Office collects all sales taxes in the state and distributes the money to cities and counties that impose a sales tax

Havelka raised a concern about sales tax collections from online retailers who sell to Fayette County residents. Havelka said she questions whether the County receives all of the sales tax receipts from online sales

“Are we getting that sales tax back here or is it going to the place where they’re selling it at?” she asked.

Weber also questioned whether the County receives the full amount of sales taxes that should be collected during the spring and fall antiques shows in the Round Top and Warrenton area.

“I’m sure there’s revenues out there, and we need to be working with the Comptroller’s Office to see what could be done there,” Weber said.

The proposed budget projects $2.7 million in sales tax collections next year. The County has collected $1.4 million in sales taxes through June of this year. During the Aug. 25 hearing, citizen Gene Kruppa asked whether the County could project $3 million for next year given the rate of collections this year

“We’re cautious because a lot changed after the first couple months of the year,” McBroom said. “The price of fuel jumped up, doubled. That’s going to take a lot of income away from people. That’s why we lowered it down to $2.7 million. We’re not far off from $3 million, but we don’t want to put $3 million out there and then we don’t hit it. We’d be in trouble.”

McBroom noted that the County cut the $270,000 in red ink from the budget they first proposed two weeks ago. However, he criticized the Record’s description of the spending overrun as a “deficit.” He said state law requires counties to dedicate eight percent of their annual budget each year to healthcare costs for indigent citizens – one of several so-called “unfunded mandates” that the state requires counties to pay for

“The article in the paper had it that we’re at a deficit,” McBroom said. “I don’t think that’s a good narrative. We were exceeding our revenues with expenditures, but we also have to remember that with indigent healthcare we have to budget eight percent.”

While the state requires counties to budget funds for indigent healthcare, the state does not require counties to spend all of that money on indigent healthcare. At the end of every budget year, Fayette County transfers hundreds of thousands of unspent dollars from the indigent healthcare fund to County reserves

“We never use it,” McBroom said. “So we’re using some of that balance to fund next year.

“I feel better about this budget than I have in the past,” McBroom said. “We went through this budget way more in-depth than we have before.”

Havelka said the proposed budget projects an ending balance of more than $5 million across all county accounts at the end of the next year

Commissioners are scheduled to vote to adopt the budget at their meeting this Thursday, Sept. 8. They will also hold a public hearing on the proposed tax rate at Thursday’s meeting