By Patricia Beech-
With the specter of shuttered power plants and lost tax revenue looming over them, the Adams County Board of Commissioners approached the county’s 2019 budget with a tight grip on taxpayers’ purse strings.
They were prepared to do with less – and they will, but not by much, according to Commissioner Diane Ward.
Ward said that budget dollars remain nearly the same as 2018 levels.
“No one’s losing their job this year,” Ward told the Defender on Thursday. “We made the county’s elected officials aware of what was going on, and they really watched their spending. I believe if we hadn’t brought them in and conducted those budgetary sessions, we wouldn’t have had a balanced budget this year.”
While the Commissioners were prepared for a worse-case scenario, they all say they were relieved when other factors came into play delaying the sweeping budget cuts that will inevitably have to be made.
Commissioner Brian Baldridge said the settlement of the state’s Medicaid sales tax issue brought substantial dollars back into the county.
“That gave us extra funding in the budget at a time when we truly needed it,” said Baldridge. “Our goal was to maintain flat funding, and we did, except for a few changes to the Ohio Revised Code of Funding Sources – it pretty much remained status quo.”
For more than 40 years the Stuart and Killen Stations provided jobs and economic resources to Adams County communities. Both residents and local government officials came to rely on the two coal-fired plants as the driving force behind the local economy.
When DP&L followed through with their plan to shut down the plants in June 2018, the economic stability they provided became a thing of the past, leaving Adams County, for the foreseeable future, without any sort of replacement for the financial resources they provided.
In Feb. 2017 Commissioner Baldridge warned the loss of those resources would be felt across-the-board.
“The effects of the potential closings will be wide-ranging throughout the county government and our school districts,” Baldridge said at the time, “Equally troubling is the additional loss of $35,000,000 in payroll that is spent locally by DP&L employees – that loss alone will negatively impact every business and individual in the county.”
County Auditor David Gifford is the Secretary of the Budget Commission which also includes the County Treasurer Lisa Newman and Prosecutor David Kelley. It is the responsibility of the Commission to annually review the tax budgets of all taxing districts within the county and to determine that all tax levies are properly authorized and allocated.
Gifford warns that the county’s 2020 budget is going to look much different than its 2019 counterpart.
“That’s when we’ll feel the full effect of the power plants closing,” Gifford said. “Deep budget cuts will have to be made – we just don’t have a choice.”