photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The Douglas County Commission listens as county staff runs through the details of the county's proposed 2023 budget at the commission's Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2022 meeting. Later in the meeting, the commission voted unanimously to adopt the budget.

Douglas County leaders voted unanimously to adopt the county’s operating budget for 2023 on Wednesday night — and confirmed that many county residents won’t be seeing any further relief from a historic increase in property tax bills.

At Wednesday’s County Commission meeting, a group of five public commenters spoke against the budget plan, and some of them urged commissioners to hold the county’s property tax rate at the so-called “revenue-neutral rate” — the level at which the county would collect the same amount of money in property taxes as it did in the previous year. But commissioners said they couldn’t do that without jeopardizing important budget items, such as keeping wages for county employees competitive.

“While I understand the people who say ‘Hold that revenue-neutral rate,’ I think we have to account for the increased costs that we have and the importance of taking care of our excellent county employees,” said Commissioner Patrick Kelly.

Technically, the $163.7 million budget that the commission adopted decreases the county’s property tax rate by one mill, to a total of 46.380 mills. However, property tax bills are determined not just by the tax rate, but also by property values in the county, and those have risen by 10% or more in many cases over the past year. In order to keep that revenue-neutral rate, the county would have had to slash the mill levy much further, to 42.188 mills.

All three county commissioners — Kelly, Shannon Reid and Shannon Portillo — said that the budget plan funded a number of important initiatives, and that some of them would be impossible if the county stuck to the revenue-neutral rate. They highlighted the $2.2 million allocated for market, merit and longevity pay for county employees, which Kelly said was necessary to attract highly qualified staff. He said it would be impossible to do it if the budget had stayed at the revenue-neutral rate.

“We would continually be behind other counties and we would have to continue to cut even more services,” Kelly said.

The public commenters also criticized the county’s decision not to dip into its fund balances, which are the county’s equivalent of a savings account, in order to lower the tax rate. As the Journal-World previously reported, the county’s fund balances are on track to start 2023 with $10 million more than they had at the beginning of this year, and the fund balances have grown by nearly $30 million since the beginning of 2019.

Douglas County Administrator Sarah Plinsky spent some of Wednesday’s meeting responding to that point. She reiterated that the county tries to keep three months’ worth of expenses in its reserve funds, and she also said that the money in some funds — like the more than $10 million that was generated by a countywide sales tax or the nearly $34 million set aside for the capital improvement plan fund — allows county officials to “pay as they go” for large capital projects.

In other business, the commission:

• Approved the 2023 budget for Consolidated Fire District No. 1, which provides firefighting services to rural areas of Douglas County. The budget includes $1.7 million in funding, and its mill levy remains unchanged from last year at 5.5 mills. The district covers most of the northern half of Douglas County, excluding Lawrence and Eudora.

• Approved issuing a request for proposals for professional design services to review the county’s “master plan” document and update a renovation project for the Judicial and Law Enforcement Center. County staff said the review was necessary because Douglas County has added a district court judge position and because the county has had to adjust many aspects of its operations over the past several years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Approved a funding request of $81,931.50 from the Center for Supportive Communities to support truancy prevention services for elementary and middle school students.

The funding is set to be used to cover the agency’s remaining operating expenses for fall 2022; that includes $71,400 to support one full-time position and three part-time positions that were previously funded through the University of Kansas, where the truancy prevention program used to be housed.

“I definitely support this request,” Reid said. “I think it is unfortunate that KU decided to stop this program without warning, really, and I do not want to see students — and families, for that matter — falling through the cracks across our community as a ripple effect of that.”