County budget committee still looking for cuts

Meets with forestry, highway and health departments about spending

Cutting spending will come with major cuts to services and the risk of falling behind in long-term road maintenance.

That was the message from department heads during the Taylor County budget review committee Monday afternoon. Committee members reviewed five budget areas at the meeting including ranging from the twoperson human resources department to the highway department.

The committee is continuing to work its way through county departments with the mission to identify ways to either cut expenses or raise revenues to eliminate $500,000 from the county budget. The committee was formed as part of a budget compromise last October where the county utilized short term borrowing for road projects, which will be paid off this spring, to exceed the state-imposed revenue cap and close a budget gap.

While the borrowing for infrastructure projects is allowed under state law, using the loophole to the revenue limits did not sit well with the more conservative members of the county board who have renewed the call to find ways to save money looking at positions and services that could be cut through attrition or other means.

Finance department

County finance director Larry Brandl walked committee members through the finance operations of the county. He primarily has two people in his department, although the larger county departments have people in their areas that specialize in dealing with financial items.

“Do we know what other counties have? Do they have this many?” asked committee member Lynn Rosemeyer questioning the staff in the finance department and among the people handling finances across the departments.

“If anything they have more,” Brandl said, noting that while he hasn’t done a survey in a while, the counties he is familiar with, such as Price County have more than double what Taylor County has in the office.

Rosemeyer questioned the need for departments such as human services and highway to have the finance positions questioning if this was possible duplication. Brandl explained that for those departments, there is a lot of accounting for how the staff hours are billed out to different grant and budget line items. The staff in those areas enters and keeps track of that information.

“These are all full-time positions that are busy, busy,” Brandl said adding emphasis to the workload they carry.

Forestry

Taylor County forest administrator Jake Walcisak walked committee members through the forestry department’s finances noting that was a review of the same information that was presented last fall when the county ultimately backed off from an attempt to impose deep cuts in the department.

Walcisak noted that for every dollar of timber revenue generated by the county forest there are just 7.6 cents of expenses.

Walcisak suggested there may be ways of increasing revenue for the county through using staff time and county equipment for additional grant-funded recreational projects in the county. He cautioned that this would come with the need for the county to take care that needed non-revenue generating projects would also be done and that there would be limits based on the work that staff needed to get done to do their primary jobs and the work for the grant programs.

Walcisak also addressed a budget cutting recommendation that was suggested by board member Scott Mildbrand to change how vehicle purchases are done in the forestry department and to mandate that they not replace the pick-ups used by the department until they have at least 120,000 miles on them.

Committee member Greg Knight objected to the idea focusing on getting every mile possible out of vehicles. “Rather than running tires off of trucks and vehicle,” Knight said, the county should instead look at maintaining trade in value. He noted that once vehicles get over the 100,000 mile mark the value goes down significantly and the county begins to incur major expenses as the vehicles wear out.

Instead, Knight suggested the county look at overall fleet management and the potential for economies of scale as they purchase vehicles. He said he did not believe that the piecemeal approach was saving the county anything.

Brandl said they need to take into account the purchasing process for the different uses of the vehicles, noting that the sheriff’s department squads are leased and are replaced after three to four years, which is different than the other departments.

“There are some economies of scale, but it cannot be a complete blanket policy,” Brandl said.

Walcisak noted that when it comes to forestry vehicles, they get passed along to other departments such as buildings and grounds and highways. “They die in county ownership,” he said, citing a vehicle that forestry used until it was needed in Zoning and then got passed to the highway department where it is still being used.

He also explained that forestry, like other departments, set aside money each year for equipment replacement to have the money saved up to replace vehicles and equipment when needed.

Walcisak noted they have worked closely with departments such as buildings and grounds and land conservation in sharing forestry equipment, tools and trailers to avoid the need for duplication. In addition, he said he has worked with buildings and grounds to write grants and would be willing to help other departments too.

Health Department

For Michelle Cahoon, a major challenge she has faced since taking over the county’s health department is in spending the highly focused grant funds they have received.

She explained that the majority of her office’s activities are grant funded with only certain areas funded with county tax levy dollars.

“We look for a grant first and then take levy dollars if we need to,” she said. The challenge is that the grants are very specific to public health.

Cahoon explained that the health department received its own funding under the federal ARPA program for COVID-19 expenses and they currently have $573,000 to spend. However, she said that with how specific the federal government is in how the money can be spent she does not think they will be able to use most of it before the deadline for its use and will have to return a large portion to the state government.

She said they have $200,000 that is set to be returned to the state this June to be reallocated to other counties. Another $281,000 has to be spent by December 2024 or be returned.

She explained that they have done some things such as office security and furniture upgrades and repainting with the funds because it could be tied to utilizing the health department office as a vaccination location.

“Are we positive it can’t be used anywhere else?” Rosemeyer asked. “We are shaking down our departments for $1,000 and we are sitting with $573,000,” Cahoon said that she recognizes the grant funds are tax dollars that everyone will have to pay for in the end, but said that if the money was going to be spent she would rather see it used in this county.

“Maybe we need to be more creative,” Rosemeyer said.

Cahoon said one of the challenges is that while they want to help out, the problem is with being able to sustain things when the grant money goes away. Rosemeyer said that she would still like Cahoon to work with human resources or others to have another set of eyes look on ways the money could be spent to benefit the county.

One area that Cahoon highlighted for potential longterm discussion is with the eventual replacement of the health inspector. The person who contracts for the service for the county has been doing it since 1989 and has indicated plans to retire in early 2024. This will leave the county with the choice of continuing with it as a contracted position where they don’t pay benefits or mileage or having the person be a county employee. She said as a contracted employee the county does not have any control over what the person does, which she said could be a good or a bad thing. State law requires inspection of restaurants, tattoo parlors, mobile home parks, campgrounds and food trucks. In addition, the current contractor does lead and radon testing and works with property owners if their water tests fail.

Cahoon said the county could give up the program and leave it to the state to do the inspection, but she said this would be the last thing she would want to see done because of the service to the clients and the lost revenue from the fees collected for those inspections.

See COUNTY on page 9 Highway department

Highway commissioner Ben Stanfley was upfront with committee members noting that as one of the county’s largest departments there is always room to make cuts.

However, he cautioned that as a department that purchases so much material and equipment, inflation impacts them more than others. For example, the price of asphalt has gone up 29% since 2019 effectively reducing the mileage he is able to do with road projects. He said the county was previously at about a 32.4 year life cycle for pavement and at the cost of materials this year they are looking at doing only 5.5 miles of road which pushes it to a 42-year life cycle for a road.

He said to maintain their level of roads he could use about $350,000 more in his department budget than what he has, let alone absorbing cuts. He also cautioned against too aggressive cuts noting that for every dollar they cut, they lose 20% on top of that in reduced state aid. “If you cut me, I lose even more,” he said.

According to Stanfley, since he took over the department he has been searching out ways to improve efficiency and save money. He has also been looking at ways to get additional utilization of equipment and create more revenue for the county through things like using the road brining equipment to apply dust control on town roads.

County human resources director Nicole Hager asked about a suggestion received to take $150,000 off the top of the highway equipment revenue.

Stanfley opposed that idea. The highway department uses cost accounting for its equipment and when it does work for the state or other entities that money goes into the equipment replacement fund. The fund has gotten to over $850,000 in recent years. However, Stanfley said the amount is actually closer to $650,000 since there are some delayed purchases which were ordered but have not yet arrived. He said that taking $150,000 off of the top would leave him only $500,000 which with plow trucks averaging between $250,000 and $270,000 would not leave him enough to replace trucks on a regular basis.

“It would put ourselves in a bad situation,” he said. Brandl agreed saying he would be against dipping into the self-generating funds for budget relief. He said the county ran into that issue in the 1990s and ended up having to play catch-up as equipment got too old and began breaking down or having no value when it came to replacement. He said he would rather see the county squeeze money out of somewhere else and use it to enhance the equipment budget.

There was also some talk about a proposal to have the airport under the highway department. Stanfley said this is a possibility but cautioned about delaying maintenance at the airport and that the cost savings of having highway crews do things like plow runways or mow grass may not be there given that especially snow removal would be on top of the road plowing work the county crews already do and may be done at an overtime rate. “It could be done cheaper by using a part-time worker,” Stanfley said.

Human resources

Hager reviewed the two-person human resources department. The biggest spending areas are for the contract county attorney service and the $36,000 spent each year for a contract with the Horton Group for the health insurance guidance.

Hager said she worked out the per hour cost of the attorney rate charged for the human services and child support areas noting it comes to $120 per hour. She said she felt this was reasonable considering the general attorney fees for the county are at $190 per hour. About 66% of the cost of the attorney fees for human services and child support are reimbursed by the state.

Hager said when they have to get outside legal counsel, the rate from the attorney in Eau Claire they use is $275 per hour with this primarily being for labor related issues.

The county will continue the budget review sessions on April 17 looking at the human services, information technology, land conservation, and buildings and grounds departments.