BENTONVILLE — Benton County’s justices of the peace plan to ask county officials to redo their 2013 budgets — cutting capital items and defending requests for new personnel, travel and other expenses — with an eye on cutting at least $1.1 million from their initial proposals.

The Finance Committee of the Benton County Quorum Court will meet with elected officials and department heads Thursday to discuss the need to revise the county’s 2013 budget. The panel agreed the budgets must be cut to match expenditures with actual revenues and not rely on returned appropriations or dip into the county’s reserves.

Justice of the Peace Dan Douglas said the county’s traditional approach to budgeting needs to change.

“If you look at all these budgets and look at their actual expenditures there’s probably about $1 million in turnback there,” Douglas said. “The way I look at it is if we’re getting a million dollars back some people aren’t doing a good job of budgeting. Let’s get down to actual dollars and cents.”

The Finance Committee sitting as the Quorum Court’s Budget Committee completed it annual review of the county’s individual fund requests Monday night with questions about capital requests and travel and training costs among the most frequent objections raised. The committee began its budget review with requests for expenditures exceeding projected revenue by about $1.6 million. That deficit has been lowered by about $500,000 so far but Sarah Daniels, the county’s comptroller, said the proposed budgets still contain about $1.6 million in capital requests. The budget contains no raises for employees or elected officials. Daniels told the justices of the peace new personnel requests carry a cost of about $220,000 for the 2013 budget.

Justice of the Peace Tom Allen, chairman of the committee, said he wants the elected officials and department heads to make the necessary cuts, but the budget committee will set the parameters.

“This is the toughest budget since 2001,” Allen said. “We made some cuts when Bella Vista incorporated but we were ready for that. There’s not as much fluff to cut as there was in the past.”

One proposal that was floated at Monday’s meeting was for the Benton County Sheriff’s Office to close the relatively new jail annex and cut the sheriff’s office personnel budget accordingly. The county’s budget for jail fees, which is money paid to the county by the state for housing state inmates, has dropped by about $1 million this year and the population of the county jail is lower than it was when the annex was proposed and approved.

“We put 13 new employees on when we opened the annex,” Douglas said. “Do we need to look at mothballing the annex and cutting some people loose?”

Justice of the Peace Frank Winscott said he thinks the Sheriff’s Office should be able to close the annex and still manage a smaller jail population.

“To me, that’s just a management problem they need to address.” Winscott said.

The committee agreed to ask elected officials and department heads whose budgets they have questions about to attend future meetings and defend their requests. The group approved a resolution to require explanation of travel and training requests.

“If you can’t do a request that says why you need it and where you’re going, then you don’t get it,” Allen said.

A suggestion that a proposed state sales tax increase dedicated for highways, city streets and county road work might allow the county to reduce its own spending on the Road Department sparked a brief dispute between Douglas and Justice of the Peace Kurt Moore after Moore pointed out the county subsidized the Road Department from the general fund.

“If that sales tax passes, we might need to take a look at that subsidy,” Moore said.

“I wholeheartedly disagree,” Douglas said, pounding the table for emphasis. “If the people pass that sales tax it’s to fix those roads. That is not right.”