County seeks to ease cuts

The Jay County Commissioners are trying to ease the difficulty of reducing the 2016 budget by making cuts this year.
It’s not unusual for a department to spend less than it had budgeted, said county auditor Anna Culy. But unless county council makes a reduction official, the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance assumes the budgeted amount is fully spent. Cutting from this year’s budget frees money for next year’s budget.
Possible reductions in the commissioners’ budget include $30,000 from employer Social Security, $5,000 to $10,000 from group health insurance, $1,000 from copy machine supplies, $1,000 from travel and mileage, $1,000 to $2,000 for copier maintenance, $1,000 for other operating expenses and $45,000 from circuit breaker.
County council can approve these reductions at its next regular meeting Oct. 14. The reduction amounts are based on what has been spent in these line items so far and what expected costs remain.
Commissioner Jim Zimmerman pointed out at Monday’s meeting that limiting encumbrances to those that are necessary will help the budget as well. Justified expenses carried from one year into the next are fine, he said, but others tie up money that could have gone back into the county general fund.
“The only thing that large encumbrances tell me — it’s kind of like our federal government operates — is we’re budgeting way over what we need to so we can spend that money if we want to,” Zimmerman said. “To me, the only thing large encumbrances show is maybe that we’re not planning our budgets maybe as well as we should.”
Zimmerman said while the commissioners have tended to sign off on encumbrances without many questions in the past, they’ll expect more explanation this year.
In other business, the commissioners:
•Heard from Jay County Development Corporation executive director Bill Bradley that JCDC is not planning on raises for its employees in 2016. Because the county is JCDC’s primary source of funding, raises there follow raises for county employees.
“I don’t see any reason why we would take pay increases,” Bradley said. “That’s not kosher.”