On December 1, after months of number crunching and tough negotiations among Cook County commissioners and county department heads to find ways to reduce costs, the board set the 2016 Cook County levy with an 8.5 percent increase, down from the original cap of 12 percent they established in early September.
The levy for 2016 will be $7,070,780, an increase of $553,932 over the 2015 levy. Commissioners decided to use $92,285 from the county’s unreserved fund balance to reduce the levy impact from 12 to 8.5 percent.
Voting for the motion were commissioners Garry Gamble, Frank Moe and Ginny Storlie. Voting against were commissioners Heidi Doo-Kirk and Jan Sivertson.
In her dissenting vote, Doo- Kirk said she was against lowering the levy too much because, “I’m extremely terrified about our public health department being at 20 percent of their fund balance when they need to be at 40 percent. We need $500,000 to get that [budget] up to speed. If their out-of-home placements keep up at the rate it is now, by this time next year they will have to come to us and borrow money from the general fund. This is [levy] a pipe dream and I can’t support it.”
Some departments trim costs
Coming into the meeting, commissioners had whittled the levy to 11.226 percent, but had asked department heads to look one last time to see if there was any more money they could winnow from their departments.
Brian Silence, head of the maintenance department, found some dollars ($32,500) to cut. IT Department Head Rena Rogers trimmed $47,850 from the copy and radio funds. Auditor/ Treasurer Braidy Powers found $6,973 in additional revenue from cost allocation while Sheriff Pat Eliasen also found some ways to trim his budget ($60,000 from the termination of the STS program) to help get the levy down to 9.9 percent.
Why is the levy so high?
At this point Gamble introduced a document he had produced that compared Minnesota’s prices of local government across Minnesota’s 87 counties. Gamble said the report was informational and based on the most recently available data (2012). He said he replicated the methodology employed by the Minnesota Department of Management and Budget and shared data from a January 2015 Minnesota Center for Fiscal Excellence report.
Gamble said the median and mean statewide “Price of Local Government” are identical at 4.20 percent of personal income. McLeod County has a low of 2.9 percent of personal income applied toward local government costs. According to Gamble’s figures, Cook County ranked highest in the state at 7 percent of personal income in Cook County.
Doo-Kirk argued that Gamble’s figures were based on Cook County’s 5,000 residents, but second homeowners and cabin owners weren’t counted, and they paid a majority of the county’s real estate taxes.
To that point, Auditor/Treasurer Powers said Cook County residents paid taxes on 1933 homestead parcels while non-locals paid taxes on 3,806 seasonal recreational parcels. He also said that while Gamble’s numbers were interesting, any formula used to decide how much individuals paid for county government was “tricky.”
Gamble also brought fourth another document titled “Why is the levy so high?” He went over the data with the commissioners and those in the room.
Federal Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) peaked in 2010, said Gamble, when the county received $2,995,867. Last year the county received $2,490,306, a 17 percent decrease, or a drop of $505,561.
State PILT has increased from $86,837 in 2001 to $359,411 in 2015, one piece of good news for the county as it jumped 314 percent an added $272,574 to county coffers.
But general state aid fell dramatically from a high of $1,088,742 in 2001 to $282,362 in 2015, a 74 percent decline and a loss of $806,380.
Investment earnings have even fared worse, Gamble said, falling from $799,292 in 2007 to $144,871 in 2014, an 82 percent decrease and a loss of $654,475 to the county.
When added up, said Gamble, the county has seen a drop of $1,693,842 in funding. “If we were to translate these dollars as to their effect on the 2016 levy, it would equate to 26 percent.”
In short, said Gamble, when commissioners first received budget requests that amounted to a 28.8 percent increase in the levy, it would have looked like a 2.8 percent increase if department heads had the same amount of money coming into their departments as they once had coming in.
Borrowing from the fund balance
Gamble made a motion to borrow $92,285 from the unreserved fund balance to bring the levy to 8.5 percent. Auditor/Treasurer Powers asked that a line item be put into next year’s budget so the money would be replaced in the unreserved fund balance. Gamble amended his motion to include Power’s suggestion and the board passed it.
Before the final motion was made to set the 2016 levy, Commissioner Frank Moe thanked the board for its hard work during the grueling budget process. “I want to remind you that the vast majority of Cook County residents wages haven’t gone up 8.5 percent this year if they have gone up at all.
“At the beginning of this process Commissioner Gamble and I advocated for no levy increase at all, but through this process we have come to a very well thought out compromise.”
“The monthly increase on my taxes [for this levy] will be $15 per month,” said Doo-Kirk. “That’s not an increase of 8.5 percent to my budget.”
Still, at meeting end, Gamble and Moe noted Doo-Kirk’s diligence and hard work in guiding the board through the rigorous process. “Heidi might not have agreed with the outcome,” said Moe, “But she doesn’t hold a grudge. She was very gracious through all of this.”
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