BENTONVILLE — Benton County’s Finance Committee completed its work on the 2014 budget earlier this week, removing a rural ambulance fee from revenue and leaving a list of capital and personnel items to be handled next year.
Meeting Information
2014 Budget
Benton County’s 2014 budget will be taken up by the Quorum Court’s Committee of the Whole when it meets at 6 p.m. Tuesday in the Quorum Courtroom in the County Administration Building, 215 E. Central Ave. in Bentonville. The Quorum Court will consider the budget when it meets at 6 p.m. Dec. 19 in the Quorum Courtroom.
Source: Staff Report
“I feel good about the budget,” said Tom Allen, District 4 justice of the peace and committee chairman. “We have a balanced budget. We’re not relying on turnback, and we’re not relying on our reserves for any operating costs. That includes two fire trucks in the budget.”
The justices of the peace balanced the budget Tuesday after learning a proposed rural ambulance service fee will have to be put to a vote. The Quorum Court approved the fee and an associated emergency medical services district in September, but a petition drive collected enough signatures from residents of the proposed district to force a referendum on the plan.
The justices of the peace learned of the success of the petition drive just before Tuesday night’s final budget meeting. During the meeting, the panel voted to remove the expected revenue from the proposed $85 annual fee on rural households along with $950,000 in anticipated ambulance service expenses from the 2014 budget until the fate of the proposed fee is determined.
The justices of the peace also revised the estimated revenue from the state for housing state inmates in the County Jail upward by $400,000 and swapped a road grader for two other pieces of equipment in the Road Department’s capital requests for 2014. The county is using two older road graders for their trade-in value of $100,000 each, leaving the cost of the new grader at only $45,000, said Bob Clinard, county judge. The two graders being traded had between 8,000 and 10,000 hours of use, Clinard said.
“We got a road grader added back to the budget,” Clinard said. “This new grader gives 16. We have 15 areas that we grade so that gives us one grader we can use if something happens.”
Sarah Daniels, county comptroller, said the most current projections show the county with $48,204,012 in estimated revenue for 2014. The budget calls for expenditures of $48,284,778. Daniels said the $80,766 difference will be made up from the county’s reserve. That amount will be added to another $155,000 in revenue that will be used to make payments for the rural ambulance service for the first three months of 2014 while the county awaits the outcome of the referendum on the rural ambulance fee or chooses to pursue another revenue source for the service.
The county expects to have about $1 million in returned appropriations when those figures are finalized at the end of March, Daniels said. The justices of the peace plan to replace the $80,766 used from the reserve for ambulance costs out of the turnback, leaving about $919,000, Allen said. The items remaining on the county’s capital equipment request carry a total cost of $632,723, and the remaining personnel requests — wage adjustments in the Sheriff’s Office and County Jail costing $62,972 and $57,342 for a proposed safety coordinator position — could be paid for from the returned appropriations or the money could be set aside for the county’s rural ambulance service costs, Daniels said.