Benton County Quorum Court Exceeds Budget

BENTONVILLE -- Benton County's justices of the peace, tasked with monitoring county spending, have exceeded their own budget for the first four months of the year.

Mike Crandall, accounting manager, said the office tracks spending for all departments and compares the spending to the percentage of the budget that would be expended.

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Quorum Court Pay

Benton County’s justices of the peace are paid $350 a month. That will be split to $175 each for Quorum Court and Committee of the Whole meetings under a pending proposal. Justices of the peace also are paid $100 for other committee meetings when they are members. Non-members who attend committee meetings are eligible to be reimbursed for mileage. Fourteen of the justices of the peace commonly submit mileage costs to the county. If those 14 attend one meeting their mileage costs run between $209 and $242, according to the County Clerk’s Office

Source: Staff Report

The county budgeted $116,404 for the Quorum Court and its expenses for 2014, with $99,927 of that in salaries, Social Security and Workmen's Compensation. With 33 percent of the year gone, planned meetings through the end of the month will take the court's spending over 34 percent and possibly higher depending on how many justices of the peace attend Tuesday's meeting of the Public Safety Committee, Crandall said.

The rural ambulance issue will be discussed at that meeting.

Barry Moehring, justice of the peace for District 15, doesn't ask for mileage. Moehring cites the short distance he drives from home or work to the County Administration Building in downtown Bentonville. Justices of the peace need to be aware of their spending, particularly since they are asking other departments to curtail spending or make cuts, Moehring said.

"It's completely fair to put that issue on the table," Moehring said. "I'm personally willing to do whatever we need to do as a court to bring our budget into line."

Kurt Moore of District 13 said the justices of the peace are dealing with substantive issues requiring the time they're putting in at their meetings.

"There's not a lot of things we can cut," he said. "We don't have any capital or much in other services. Probably the only thing we can do is to have fewer meetings or appropriate more money. We did go over budget last year and we probably should have taken that into account when we were setting the budget for this year. Instead, we went back to the inadequate amount we had the year before. That seems to have been an oversight."

Joel Jones of District 7, said the county is dealing with issues demanding they spend more time on them.

"If we can get past EMS that would help," Jones said. "It's also a legislative year so the Legislative Committee meetings have been necessary. I was hoping it wouldn't continue, but we have business we have to deal with and the meetings are the only way we can do that. I think we budgeted like we thought we'd need to. If we trend like we're trending now, we're going to have to put a little more money into it."

County Judge Bob Clinard said it might be helpful for the justices of the peace to examine their own spending while asking others to make cuts.

"They need to apply the same standards to themselves and their own budget that they apply to other county budgets," he said.

Moore suggested they might consider curtailing their mileage requests for committee meetings they attend when they aren't members of the committee and possibly mileage sought for meetings with constituents or other nonmandatory functions.

"I'd say that's a personal decisions," Moore said. "I know in my case I have a considerable distance to drive. But if the elected officials will forego the mileage they claim, I'd be willing to do the same."

Jones suggested they consider how they schedule meetings and possibly "stack" meetings when the topics will be related or referred from one committee to another, such as having a personnel meeting followed by a finance meeting

"It's definitely something we should ask of ourselves," he said.

Tom Allen of District 4 and chairman of the Finance Committee, said the amount the Quorum Court is over budget by isn't large, but the trend needs to be monitored. The rural ambulance issue has been driving the increase in meetings in recent years, he said.

"We're just barely over so I'm not too concerned right now," he said. "It's probable we're going to need to adjust it later on. The wild card is how many EMS meetings we're going to have. We can probably work with everything else."

NW News on 04/26/2014

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