County passes 2017 budget

County passes 2017 budget

Quorum Court, county officials looking forward to ‘ another great year’

news@theeveningtimes.com

Crittenden County saw a historic month of sales tax collections and will end the year ahead of budget projections.

“We’ve had another great month on our local sales tax,” said County Treasurer Charlie Suiter. “It’s a lot higher historically than we are used to seeing.”

Suiter said the county should end the year 12 to 14 percent ahead of what they projected.

He noted that the hospital tax, which normally generates about $500,000 a month, took in $600,000 in November.

“Our current information is that we have taken in $4 million,” Suiter said. “So we’ve been real good with the sales tax.”

On a related matter, the Quorum Court passed a $20.1 million budget — up from $18.8 million in 2016. County Judge Woody Wheeless said the 2017 budget is up because it includes a 6 percent pay raise for employees and an additional $200,000 expenditure in the road department to replace four vehicles, a mower and trash truck.

“Everything else is pretty normal and stable,” Wheeless said. “Our county is in very good financial shape.

When January rolls around the three funds we track the most — county general, county roads, and county jail — all three of those will be up Jan. 1 compared to a year ago” Wheeless said every department came in underbudget in 2016.

“All the elected officials do a good job of watching their funds,” Wheeless said. “When I was looking at the numbers for 2016, the actuals were less than what we had budgeted for everybody. When you see that, you know that officials are doing their job and not wasting that money.”

The 2017 budget also does not include a hospital millage tax for operation and maintenance of the former Crittenden Regional Hospital building.

“We adjusted a few things where there were shortfalls and consolidated a few things and took other things off-line,” Suiter said. “I would like to thank you for all of your hard work.”

Suiter said the county is always conservative when they put together the budget and revenue projections, and build the budget around those projections in case they do have an issue somewhere in the year or things slow down so the county doesn’t get hurt.

“It looks good and I am very pleased with everything,” Suiter said. “It looks like we are going to have another great year.”

By Mark Randall