Marching toward a new fiscal year

What do the budget numbers really mean?

Before we get into money talk, let’s take a minute to recognize and express our gratitude to the people that keep the county safe regardless of weather. Our amazing fire-rescue volunteers have been scooping people out of wrecked cars since the snow started to fall while continuing their role of transporting the sick to area hospitals on dangerous roads. Our wonderful deputies keep the peace and also respond to hordes of weather-related vehicle wrecks. We need especially to honor the county dispatchers who are the calm at the eye of the storm answering many frantic 911 calls while they ensure that helps gets where it’s needed. Thanks to all of you for protecting us from ourselves.

Now to money.

As the country’s economy continues its freefall, Goochland is weathering the storm, so far.
While Congress talks about trillions of dollars, Goochland’s proposed $57.8 million dollar budget seems trivial by comparison. However, those local tax dollars hit close to home and provide some vital services.
During budget discussions on Monday, February 23, the board of supervisors seemed cautiously optimistic that the county tax rate will remain at 53 cents per $100 of valuation.
The budget workbook, which was posted on the county website www.goochland.va.us after way too many secret squirrel maneuvers, has lots of numbers and little detail. Please take a look for yourself.
Hopefully, the supervisors have more detailed information on which to base their fiscal decisions.
Because the property valuation as a result of the latest countywide reassessment increased less than one percent, the county is not required to reduce the tax rate so that it takes in the same amount of money as it did before reassessment.
Warned last fall to prepare flat budgets, county department requests produced a proposed budget slightly smaller for fiscal 2009-10 than of the current fiscal year 2008-09. The county’s fiscal year begins on July 1.
The school system stepped up to the plate and presented a budget request less than for the current year.
Budget talks between the schools and supervisors tend to be filled with drama, a result of a system that makes the schools beg for every penny from supervisors who are under pressure to keep tax rates low. This is exacerbated by the county’s failure to encourage economic development so it can keep pace with increasing infrastructure needs.
The supervisors, expressing their continuing support for the county’s teachers, wisely want to know exactly how many people on the school system’s payroll are actively involved in instruction, a number that has been elusive.
Goochland is blessed with many very fine teachers at all grade levels who use their training, dedication and skill to prepare our students for the challenges they will face as adults. They deserve our respect, gratitude and support.
If all those people on the central office payroll are vital to the operation of county schools, justifying their roles should be simple and straightforward.
A cloud on the horizon is the uncertainty about actual amount of state money that will flow from Richmond to Goochland. A silver lining to that cloud is that, due to the arcane method used by the state to determine how much money returns to localities, Goochland gets only about 20 percent of its school funds from the Commonwealth.
Happily, the General Assembly has reached budget accord in March so that localities across the Commonwealth are not groping in the dark as they try to figure out how much money will be flowing from Richmond.
Let’s hope that this year’s budget hearing is free from the theatrics annually ginned up by the school board to shame the supervisors into fully funding the requested school budget. Last year following the usual histrionics, District 4 supervisor Malvern R. “Rudy” Butler, told incensed parents that the school budget had indeed been fully funded.
The notion that slowing the rate of spending increases constitutes a budget cut is pure semantic nonsense.
The supervisors are prudently concerned about fiscal year 2010-11, which may well be worse than this year. By then we will have a much better idea how deep and how long the whatever it is we are in will be.
Yet while the board continues to tweak the budget for fiscal 2009-10, they will probably vote to approve an additional $3,727,461 in expenditures (see below) for the current fiscal year. The current year’s budget, approved last March, was $58,440,672. So that means, with the additions, this year’s budget is $62,168,133. About a million dollars will come out of the county’s fund balance and half as much will come from “other” sources. The $2,059,827 will pay for construction of a section of water line in Henrico that will ensure optimal capacity for the Tuckahoe Creek Service District.
This is pretty much business as usual for the county. A budget is crafted, tweaked, presented to the public and voted on by the first week in April. The ensures that the annual tax rate, effective January 1, is in place to calculate property tax bills, whose first half is due in early June. It seems like the tax rate was decided on around October and the budget process worked backwards to agree with that rate.
Somewhere during the course of the fiscal year, needs for funds not identified in the budget arise and the board votes to appropriate additional money that seems to have magically become available.
Why does this happen each year? Are the budget projections that inaccurate, or are they relatively meaningless? Just how accurate a reflection of the county’s income and spending is its annual budget?
Of course, no one can predict the future. To some extent any budget is at best a guest mate. However, a supplemental appropriation of close to $4 million for a $58 million budget seems like a lot.
Last year’s unprecedented high fuel costs, for instance, could not have been predicted when the school system was compiling its budget.
Each department should have the flexibility to manage its own budget, but the supervisors, who provide the money for expenditures, must have a pretty good idea of the amount and purpose of overall fund requests.
Fiscal oversight is perhaps the most important duty of the supervisors. They need both the information and judgment to do it well.

PROPOSED AMENDMENTS TO THE 2008-09 BUDGET

ESTIMATED ADDITIONAL REVENUES
General Fund Balance $1,052,625
Federal 4,839
State 51,392
Water/Sewer 2,059,827
Other 558,778
TOTAL $3,727,461

ESTIMATED ADDITIONAL EXPENDITURES
General Government $ 49,931
Judicial 38,986
Public Safety 55,516
Public Works 14,700
Human Services 8,974
Education 649,424
Parks/Recreation 11,686
Community Development 152,169
Water/Sewer 2,059,827
Capital 686,248
TOTAL $ 3,727,461