Clark County Manager Shawn Henessee presented a relatively rosy outline of his proposed 2019 budget at a county council work session Wednesday that includes no sweeping cuts and a small property tax increase.
Henessee, who became the county’s chief executive over the summer, said that in crafting the proposed budget he had to balance requests for funding — much of it for maintenance or software — with the need to fulfill state-mandated functions and other demands on the county’s finances.
“There’s no science to this,” he said. “It is an art, in the end, I firmly believe that.”
Among the bright spots in Henessee’s roughly $532 million proposed annual budget is strong revenue from sales and property taxes, which account for a respective 23 percent and 39 percent of general fund revenue. He also said that currently there are no cuts required to balance the budget.
The county previously used a two-year cycle for budgets and is now using annual budgets.
Henessee’s proposed budget calls for a 1 percent increase in the total tax levy allowed under state law to support the general fund — the county’s largest and primary operating fund. The tax increase would add $3.41 to the property tax bill of a home assessed at $349,900, the median price of a home in Clark County.
According to Henessee’s presentation, the increase would generate $634,644 in revenue and would keep the general fund above the $24.3 million minimum required by county policy. The county has foregone the 1 percent increase for this fund in five of the last seven years. Henessee said that the impact of forgoing the increase has compounded, and the county now has $3.2 million less annually.
During the meeting, Clark County Council Chair Marc Boldt, who voted for the increase the last two years, said he’s previously gone to the state Legislature to ask for additional funding and was asked what the county had done to increase revenue.
Responding to a question from Councilor Julie Olson, Henessee said about 80 percent of the general fund goes to law and justice, including the courts, jail and sheriff’s office.
An ongoing concern with the county’s budget has been personnel costs rising faster than revenues. Henessee said that the county’s number of full-time employees has stayed relatively flat. For the 2009-2010 budget cycle, there were about 1,125 full-time employees with costs of $283.4 million to the general fund. For the 2017-2018 budget, there were 1,067 full-time employees with costs of $321.3 million to the general fund.
Henessee said he received 156 decision packages from county departments and offices. Each decision package represents a possible adjustment to the budget in either the form of a new request for funding or a new revenue or savings. He recommended the council approve 103 of these packages. Included is about $1 million in reimbursements Clark County won’t receive, primarily from the city of Vancouver, due to fewer inmates charged with misdemeanors being housed in the county’s overcrowded jail.
“We have had quite a bit of capacity issues over at the jail,” Henessee said.
One of the biggest funding requests Henessee said he is recommending is $447,029 for the county to adopt Office 365 software. Another is a $384,158 annual subscription for the county’s new Workday software.
A third large decision package is $30,000 to raise fees paid to guardian ad litems, people appointed to represent the best interests of a child or incapacitated person in court. Henessee said that the fees haven’t been adjusted in 23 years.
The funding requests he didn’t recommend are still needed, he said, there’s just not enough money for them right now. Henessee specifically mentioned $770,000 to replace the aging case management software in the prosecuting attorney’s office, as well as two other requests totaling $687,270 for records personnel in the sheriff’s office. He said he would look for funding for these requests in the county’s spring update to the budget.
Another set of requests Henessee didn’t recommend concern a proposal to create a new office of indigent defense. Currently, the county contracts with private attorneys for the constitutionally mandated service, unlike other counties that provide the service in-house. Earlier this year, a county workgroup recommended increasing pay for these attorneys while creating an in-house public defender office.
“I think this is another critical thing that we’re going to have to address,” Henessee said. “We just don’t, again, have money to address it right now.”
Olson noted that indigent defense is a service the county is mandated to perform but is one of the “pressure points on the general fund we can’t control.”
Henessee will formally publish his entire recommended budget Nov. 6. The council will hear testimony in December. It will have the opportunity to amend the budget before approving it.
