No objections registered as county approves fiscal year 2016-17 budget

BY BROOKS TAYLOR

Mt. Pleasant News

Henry County?s Board of Supervisors put its stamp of approval on the fiscal 2016-17 county budget Tuesday, following a public hearing on the financial document.

There was no verbal nor written feedback either before or during the public hearing. Next fiscal year?s budget calls for $16.7M in expenditures and a reduction of over $1 for both the urban and rural tax rates.

Urban (town) residents will pay $6.80 per $1,000 taxable valuation in property taxes while the rural levy is $10.75. The levies for the fiscal 2016 budget are $7.94 for urban residents and $11.89 for rural residents.

County Auditor Shelly Barber said most of the decrease in the tax asking is because the county is not levying for mental health in fiscal 2017. ?We have a large fund balance (in the mental health fund), so we didn?t levy anything this year.?

According to county officials, the county currently has a $1.9M mental health fund balance.

Barber said that had the county levied for mental health, the levy would have been $1.08 per $1,000 taxable valuation in next year?s budget. The 2016 fiscal budget included a $1.12 levy for mental health. However, for the fiscal 2017 budget, county valuation increased by $29 million to $783,065,671, which would have led to a reduction in the mental health levy had the supervisors chosen to levy for mental health.

The budget includes the compensation board?s recommendation of five percent salary increases for elected officials and two percent for all other county employees not under a union contract.

Supervisors Greg Moeller and Gary See said they did hear some comments recently about the five percent wage increase for elected officials. ?I heard some comments, but not complaints, at the legislative forum Saturday about the five percent,? Moeller reported.

He said he would not be opposed to forgoing his five-percent salary increase.

Barber said the supervisors are exempt from altering the salary recommendation for county-elected. ?Supervisors, and only the supervisors, have the option of removing themselves from the equation,? she noted.

For other county elected officials, the supervisors cannot raise the compensation board?s salary recommendation but can decrease it. The decrease has to be equitable, though, for all other officials, meaning that if the supervisors would have decreased the recommendation to three percent, all other elected officials would have had to receive a three percent salary increase.

The auditor also said that the five percent increase for supervisors ?did not make that much difference in the budget.? The collective salary increase for supervisors was $5,596.

The 2016-17 budget year runs from July 1, 2016, to June 30, 2017.

In other agenda matters, bids were opened for the grading and surfacing of 260th Street at Gibson?s Corner on Franklin Avenue and extending west two miles.

Cole Construction Company, Inc., of Keosauqua, submitted the low bid of $154,033. The remaining five bids were not close to Cole?s bid. FYE Excavating, Inc., of Sperry, was next at $179,182.70. Bids ranged upward to $270,720.93.

County Engineer Jake Hotchkiss said he would evaluate the bids and have a recommendation for the supervisors next week.

Hotchkiss also reported that he had a pre-construction meeting Monday with Cedar Valley Construction, the bid winner for the Winfield Avenue (County Road H38) reconstruction project. The road from the U.S. Highway 218 overpass to Racine Avenue (six miles) will be removed and reconstructed beginning this spring.

?We had a good meeting yesterday,? Hotchkiss remarked. ?They want to get an early start on the project and have it finished by harvest, weather permitting.?

During the work, the road will be open to local traffic only, he said. Cedar Valley Construction hopes to begin work in April. A landowner/tenant informational meeting is set for 6 p.m., on March 15 at the Henry County Emergency Management Office.

In his weekly report to supervisors, Hotchkiss said the secondary roads crew spent much of last week cold patching on Winfield Avenue and hauling spot rock to various county roads for patching purposes.

Supervisors meet again in regular session Thursday at 9 a.m., in the Henry County Courthouse.