Allen County received a bit of good news before officials start sizing up next year’s budget.
County Clerk Sherrie Riebel told commissioners Tuesday the county’s assessed valuation projects to increase about $10 million this year to $153 million — perhaps the largest single-year increase in county history.
Higher property values would translate to a lower mill levy, provided commissioners keep their pledge to keep spending level in 2023.
The bulk of the higher valuation comes from higher valued ag ground, Riebel said.
“I fully intend to lower the mill levy,” Commissioner Jerry Daniels said. “We’ll see what happens when budget discussions occur. We’ll be working on that soon.”
But Daniels and fellow commissioners also cautioned that skyrocketing inflation rates, covering everything from gasoline to tires, will make it difficult for county departments to operate with a static budget as their costs increase.
“We may have to make some cutbacks,” Sheriff Bryan Murphy said, after he was asked about planning budgeting for 2023. “We may have to do some training in-house, and find what’s free out there” for such things as equipment.
Murphy declined to speculate whether fuel prices may eventually curtail regular patrols across a 900-square-mile county. “With $5 gasoline by the end of June, there will be some sheriffs having that discussion,” Murphy said. “It’s not good. We’ll take calls, and do what we’ve gotta do. It’s a struggle.”
Commissioners will hammer out their 2023 spending plan through June and July, with adoption earmarked for sometime in August.
“I want to be as realistic as possible with budget requests,” Commissioner Bruce Symes said. “Some things may have to be put on the backburner. I kind of approach the county budget process, rightly or wrongly, like my own household budget, thinking if we have to spend more for something, we may have to cut back somewhere else.”
Symes invited each county department head and other agencies that rely on county funding to visit in person with commissioners in the coming weeks to detail their requests.
A CARLYLE resident hopes to slow traffic going through town on Texas Road, one of the county’s main east-west corridors aside from U.S. 54.
Mike Church, who lives along the road in Carlyle, suggested the county put up a four-way stop sign at the road’s intersection with Adams Street. Stop signs already are in place for Adams, he noted.
Symes asked if the traffic load warranted a stop sign.
Church offered that it did.
“You wouldn’t think so but there’s a lot of traffic that travels through there,” he said.
