Community groups feel the squeeze with discretionary spending budget cuts
By Nate Kelly
July 17, 2008 - 11:16AM
Community groups that serve the young, elderly and handicapped will be hit hard by a shrinking budget if the proposed 2009 budget is approved. Discretionary spending for Walton County is being slashed by 26.8 percent.
The upcoming cuts come on top of a 50 percent cut for the 2006-07 year. The 2008-09 budget will include additional cuts of one-third, according to Bill Imfeld, finance director for Walton County.
"These groups have all been advised for the past five budget cycles that they needed to be coming up with plans for achieving self-sustainability without county contributions," said Imfeld.
The cutbacks in community organizations follow last year's removal of contributions to cultural development groups when budgets for arts and culture groups were cut to zero according to Ken Little, citizen services director. "I hope faith based groups and private citizens will step up."
One of the largest reductions is the complete elimination of the Economic Development Council's budget of $19,250.
"Assessment of Economic Development Council's achievement of County goals would seem to indicate their failure to achieve those goals. Consequently their budget was cut in half this year and now eliminated for 2008-2009," said Imfeld.
For the last three to four years, no additional funds for new groups have been allocated, said Little.
Every part of the budget will be reduced with exceptions in the areas of animal control, beach renourishment, corrections, court technology and construction management.
The Tourist Development Council and Planning and Development Services Division are also expected to receive budget cuts of more than $1 million.
Walton County will also be eliminating 17.5 full-time positions to reduce its budget further. Sixteen positions will be removed from various programs under the BCC's jurisdiction, the majority will come from planning and development which will be losing eight full-time positions. The only constitutional office to be affected by employee cuts is the property appraiser's office, which will eliminate one full-time position.
In addition to not hiring any new positions or rehiring for vacancies, the county is eliminating salary increases and cost-of-living adjustments to further tighten their budget, according to Cindy Meadows, Dist. 5 commissioner.
"It's going to affect the employees by not providing raise increases with the cost of gas and the cost of living continually going up," said Meadows. "But like I keep saying, it's bad out there but Walton County is in pretty good shape compared to other counties in the state."
Some thoughts:
No meaningful positions cut- mostly temps and part-time secretarial help. None are high paying Senior Management folks.
Other programs that were cut include:
Veterans
ARC
Council on Aging
Libraries
Ag Extension (4H)
Shelter House
Children's Advocacy Center
and much more...
Meanwhile theymaintain the following:
A 7 person Human Resource Department with a budget of $569,079. $485,949 of which is nothing but salary and benefits for the (7). An additional $10,500 is spent for professional services for outsiders to do the work these 7 cannot accomplish.
The Office of Management and Budget themselves have 18 employees and a budget of $337, 104 and salaries and benefits makes up $313,354, of that total.
Each county department is similar to these examples. Here is an idea, cut every employee salary that is making over $90,000, by only $2,000 each in order to retain the funding for programs that will benefit the needy and most vunerable of our citizens.
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