Auditor: County doing better than many budget-wise

With many counties across the country facing onerous budget cuts, staff furloughs and layoffs, good communication and sound anticipation has spared Athens County from such a fate at this point, county Auditor Jill Thompson said Tuesday.

The county's Budget Planning Commission met Tuesday to go over figures for the upcoming year.

"I really commend the elected officials here," Thompson said. "We do work very well together. And we communicate. We have these budget meetings every month to keep everyone up to date."

For 2010, the county is projecting estimated excess revenue of around $932,000. Since 2001, this compares to a low of $418,317 in 2005 and a high of $1.8 million in 2008. This number gets added to the amount of money various county offices were budgeted but didn't spend, also known as the estimated unexpended appropriation, to get the estimated total carryover into next year's budget. This second number is not known at this time because the county isn't finished writing checks for the year. The number is estimated to be around $100,000 on the low end or $700,000 on the high end.

Athens County Commissioner Lenny Eliason said at the meeting that he would guess the number to come in this year between $300,000 and $500,000. If Eliason's guess comes true, the county will have between $1.23 million and $1.43 million in carryover. Thompson said that this carryover money is used by the county for the first three months or so of the budget until tax revenue starts coming in.

Estimated county revenue for 2010 is at $11,187,703. When added to carryover, this gives the county a 2010 budget of between $12.2 and $12.8 million.

Thompson explained that the Budget Commission's job is to estimate revenue. This is done by looking at the two biggest chunks of revenue for the county "“ sales taxes and real-estate taxes, she said.

"The key thing is that we are meeting our [revenue] projections, and we're not falling below," Thompson said. "And where we are falling below, we have other areas that we're compensating for it."

The estimated sales tax receipts for the end of this year come in around $5.1 million, and the estimated end-of-year real-estate tax receipts come in at $1.85 million. Both of these figures come in above what the county had expected, with the county having estimated $1.78 million in revenue for this year from real estate and $4.8 million in revenue from sales taxes.

Thompson said that the county obviously wants to project low, but not too low.

"There's that fine line between [estimating] too low and conservative and costing jobs or performance or services, or [estimating] too high where your revenue comes in too low and you have to cut," Thompson said. "You don't ever want to give the commissioners too big of a pie, and then force them to cut it."

Thompson explained that the county commissioners' duty is to appropriate monies to various offices funded through the county.

"What we do is say this is how big your pie is," she said, "and their job is to cut it up."

She said that the new system that's been developed gives the commissioners an estimate of how much of that pie is left each month; this has helped the county to not overspend.

One reason other counties are struggling where Athens County is on steady ground, Thompson said, is because other counties' delinquency rate on real-estate taxes is much higher.

"They don't have as aggressive of a prosecutor and a treasurer," she said. "Ours, I boast on them because they work very hard to make sure that people are paying their taxes and they foreclose if they don't. You have counties that don't do that. And if they don't do that, their delinquency gets high and there's no incentive to pay."

With regard to sales tax, the county has been conservative in estimating revenue, Thompson said. While some sales-tax increases in revenue can be expected, such as when college students move back into the area, she said, most of the time it is difficult to estimate how much revenue will come in from the sales tax at any given time.

"We can see trends "“ watch trends and fluctuations "“ where we can see that maybe cars aren't selling, so we lost a lot of money here but we gained a lot of money in grocery," she said. "So we watch that so we can identify something that's going to happen."

The rule of thumb, she said, is to not estimate more than what was received the prior year. Last year, however, was the first year the county cut that number from what they normally would have projected, she said.

Considering the trouble with Ohio's state budget, she said, Athens was one of the first counties in the state to start cutting the revenue estimate for money from the state. The county told townships and villages to certify less than the state had said they would receive. So when state cuts came around, the county was prepared.

"I think we've done a pretty good job this year," Thompson said. "We did get some cuts... and we were within a couple percentage points of still being in the safe margins... I just believe very firmly that budgets are about communication, and sometimes it's just guessing correctly."