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Vance County Manager Jordan McMillen provided WIZS with the following statement concerning the County’s current state of affairs and the 2020-2021 budget process:
On the Vance County business front, we have trying to operate as close to normal as we can. All County employees continue to work, but we have limited interactions and access to the public in our offices due to COVID-19.
We have continued to hold our committee meetings. We held our Commissioners’ meeting on April 6 – we did not have enough members of the public in attendance to go over our 10 public restriction in the room, but we also made the meeting available on Zoom.
We are on schedule for our next Board of Commissioners’ meeting on Monday evening, May 4, 2020, and will make that one available on Zoom as well. In order to avoid any potential “Zoom bombers” or hacking, the County will have the meeting log-in information for anyone that wants to call and get it, but we are not pushing it out via all media outlets.
We have a properties committee meeting scheduled for Tuesday, April 28 at 3 p.m. to discuss the schedule for the Eaton-Johnson Renovation and will follow that with an HR committee meeting.
A lot of our attention from the staff standpoint lately has been on the budget. We are finalizing the numbers this week and plan to present the budget to the commissioners at the May 4 meeting.
COVID-19 has had and will continue to have impacts on next year’s budget. Our main concern is the impact on sales tax revenues due to the various businesses that have been shut down the last month or so. For the current budget year, sales tax impacts will be felt during the last month in the fiscal year (June) as sales tax dollars come into the county three months after the sale.
For the next fiscal year, we are expecting lower sales tax revenues for the first and second quarters of the fiscal year and quite possibly into early 2021 – realizing this time period could be extended depending upon how the economy reacts. As a result, we are budgeting conservatively for sales tax revenues which limits our ability even further to add large items to next year’s budget.
The other impact we have seen on budgeting is that businesses which typically list business personal property by April 15 have been slower to list this year. They are coming in, but it has delayed our ability to finalize the budget numbers as we use what is listed to determine property tax revenue for the next year. We intend to finalize this tomorrow and may have to make a projection vs. basing it off of the actual listed property.
All in all, I am pleased where we are with the budget in light of the challenges we have had lately with COVID-19, but I am recommending to the board that we revisit our revenue projections in the fall to ensure we are still on point with all of the uncertainty.
In terms of normal budget worries, I am always concerned this time of year with the number of necessary budget requests from departments that we are unable to fund. The board will ultimately decide whether we made the right choices when they review the budget, but we are always challenged with only minimal revenue growth and the ability we have to fund additional items without raising taxes.