By JONATHAN ZWEYGARDYT
Hays Post
At the beginning of 2020, the Ellis County governmental budget looked as though it could take a significant hit with the pandemic weighing heavily, but the county now expects to see significant savings.
At last week's county commission meeting interim County Administrator
Darin Myers said they are expecting to be able to roll about $2.8 million over
into next year’s budget.
The commission
approved a budget transfer of approximately $972,000 from the current budget
into the county’s equipment reserve fund.
County policy allows each department to transfer half of their unspent budget authority into the reserve fund at the end of the year.
“Those capital reserves pay for graders, ambulances (and) large capital purchases,” said Myers.
Both the sheriff’s and the EMS department transferred more than $200,000.
Myers also presented a brief budget update to the commission and said the transfers and several different areas of savings led to the extra cash.
Among those was $90,000 left in a contingency fund. The county was able to save about $840,000 when the county worked to restructure the wage scale and pay raises.
They also saw an increase in revenues in 2020. The county was over the expected budget revenues about a little more than $900,000, according to Myers.
Myers said those numbers are currently rough estimates but totals about $2.8 million that is expected to be rolled over into unencumbered cash for the next year.
“When we always discuss COVID, there’s always the negative impacts,” Myers said. “But I think, this year, it has had some positive impacts on our budget.”
Myers said this allows the county to put money aside for future projects and keep money in the general fund for large projects that are coming up.
The increase comes after the county faced a rough start. After the drop in oil prices due to the pandemic and outside forces, the county saw the oil valuation cut in half with losses of close to $500,000 expected.
Ellis County Commissioner Dean Haselhorst, who works in the energy sector, said this week it was great to see Ellis County potentially overcome that loss and said he didn’t expect to see that amount of saving they have seen.
“Thank you to all our department heads, elected officials and the citizens of Ellis County that are shopping, helping with the sales tax too, and those that come in from out of county,” Haselhorst said.
After voters approved the sales tax in April, a county-wide half-cent tax went into effect on Oct. 1.
Myers estimated the two taxes will generate more than $2 million per year.
A portion of the tax revenue goes directly to funding health services within Ellis County and the commission has elected to set aside another portion that will go toward road and bridge projects within the county.
The county was also able to take advantage of federal CARES Act funding to pay for two larger equipment upgrades.
The commission approved $200,000 to pay for an ambulance that was scheduled to be replaced next year through equipment reserve funds. They also approved $1.5 million to pay for updates to emergency dispatch and the county's 911 system.
Haselhorst said the added revenue from the sales tax and the savings will allow the county to better prepare for the future.
“Our goal is to start a true saving account,” Haselhorst said. “So when we have a line item, instead of always bonding things out, we can write a check for it and it just puts us in a much better financial situation.”