photo by: Journal-World

The west side of the Douglas County Courthouse, 1100 Massachusetts St., is pictured on Sept. 23, 2021.

It only took the Douglas County Commission one of two scheduled meetings this week to finish deliberating on the county’s proposed budget, and key to county leaders’ changes is a tentative decrease to the proposed mill levy.

The levy that commissioners decided on during Monday’s budget deliberations is 46.380 mills. That’s 1.039 mills lower than the proposed levy of 47.419 mills, which had been left unchanged from last year in the proposed budget. A mill equates to $1 per $1,000 of assessed property value. Assessed property value can be determined by multiplying a home’s value by Kansas’ statewide assessment percentage of 11.5%, or .115.

Lowering the county’s mill levy by that amount leads to a reduction of about $1,783,000 in the tax dollars the county would collect. The amended rate’s effect on county taxpayers, however, is slight; for example, the tax bill for a property owner whose home’s actual value is $200,000 is about $1,066.74 if the amended levy of 46.380 mills is used. That’s only about $24 less than the tax bill if the higher proposed levy is used.

All three commissioners indicated on individual decision worksheets that they wanted a lowered levy, and Commissioner Shannon Reid said the amended number ended up being a greater change than she expected possible. Fellow Commissioner Patrick Kelly said it seemed clear that the group was interested in responding to the county’s property tax base increasing by 12.4% this year, up nearly 10% compared with the county’s 2.75% assessed valuation in 2021.

“I feel that we’re trying to be responsive to the increases we’ve seen in assessed valuation,” Kelly said. “At the same time, we’re not out of the pandemic yet — and the impacts of the pandemic — so I feel fortunate we can provide some relief from the burden of taxes and, at the same time, balance that with making sure we have the services that are needed in our community.”

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The worksheets commissioners completed also indicated what supplementary budget requests from community partners they would like to see funded and for how much. Budget hearings throughout last week gave commissioners the opportunity to hear more about those requests, whether from fire and medical officials or affordable housing and criminal justice reform agencies.

Some of the commission’s tentative decisions on that front during Monday’s deliberations included:

• Opting against funding Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical’s budget requests related to adding a new station. All three commissioners indicated they wanted to remove line items granting $450,000 for a new ambulance and $360,000 toward adding a new station, both of which were included in the proposed budget. That also meant commissioners weren’t interested in putting about $400,000 toward hiring nine paramedics to staff that new ambulance, which was part of the agency’s supplementary budget requests.

One supplementary request from fire and medical officials the commission did opt to fund was a $191,700 request to add two staff members and a vehicle for a “mobile integrated health program,” which would identify patients whose needs could be better met by other agencies in the community and steer them toward those resources.

• Awarding at least partial funding to two agencies — the Center for Supportive Communities and Tenants to Homeowners — requesting to join the county’s list of “community partners,” agencies represented each year in conversations about the budget. County spokesperson Karrey Britt told the Journal-World that county staff sends information about the budget process in March to agencies that have received funding in the previous year, as well as any nonprofit organization that wants the information. That information explains the process to request more funding.

Tenants to Homeowners is set to receive the entire $100,000 it requested to support operating costs and managing its existing and future supportive housing units.

As for the Center for Supportive Communities, the commission elected to partially fund its request to support a truancy prevention program with $100,000. Their request, in total, was for $150,000, and the commission elected to move the unallocated $50,000 to the commissioners’ budget. They also reduced the budget hit for O’Connell Children’s Shelter, another agency interested in advancing truancy prevention in the county, by $50,000 and moved that amount to the commissioners’ budget.

That $100,000 will go toward advancing truancy prevention in the county moving forward in general, something commissioners voiced interest in during last week’s budget hearings and again on Monday.

“I’m really excited about the truancy conversation and the impacts it will have — maybe not in the next two to three years, but down the line many years from now, on our criminal justice and our jail numbers,” Kelly said. “I do believe that makes a difference. I also think it’s economic development, as we keep kids in school and get them on track.”

• Electing to provide only partial funding for some of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office’s more costly requests for hiring more officers. The office requested funding to hire six corrections officers and four road deputies. Instead, the office will be granted funding to hire just three corrections officers, at a cost of $176,727, and one road deputy, at a cost of $79,104.

“This is one where I found the sheriff’s argument really compelling about needs within the jail because of our strategy that we only want people who really need to be detained to be detained, and those are often higher-need individuals,” Commissioner Shannon Portillo said. “I think there’s a really compelling argument for additional corrections officers.”

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Now that budget hearings and deliberations have come to a close, commissioners will next review the proposed budget for a final time at the July 20 commission meeting. The final hearing to adopt the 2023 budget is tentatively set for Aug. 24, according to county staff.