County budget hikes taxes, but also cuts staff

The Flathead County commissioners are on track to approve a $91.5 million budget this week that raises property taxes about $11.50 for the owner of a home with a market value of $200,000.

The proposed final budget also includes a 2.1 percent raise for county employees, but reduces the workforce by the equivalent of 10.3 full-time employees to offset sizable increases in health-insurance costs. With the staffing reductions, the county goes into its new fiscal year with the equivalent of 529.4 employees.

Health insurance costs are also up.

This year, the county plans to levy 12.53 mills through the permissive medical levy to raise roughly $3 million through property taxes. Last year the county levied 10.25 mills to collect $2.4 million.

During the last fiscal year, a decision was made midyear to increase the annual revenue going into its self-insured medical benefit plan by $1 million, due to a $529,000 drop in the trust fund balance between July and November. Even with the increased revenue into the plan, the last fiscal year still ended with a trust fund balance that was considered too low “for a healthy reserve for a plan our size,” county Administrator Mike Pence noted in his budget message.

The county increased its deductibles and premiums and canceled its wellness program because it was no longer providing a return on investment, Pence said.

The other break-out hearing will take comments on the commissioners’ intention to levy 0.7 mills to pay for increased employer contributions for the sheriff retirement program for county employees. That’s down from last year’s 0.76 mill levy, because of a workforce reduction of eight detention officers in the county jail.

Flathead County’s total taxable value increased by about $2.5 million, to $245.65 million with the certification of the new valuation numbers from the state Department of Revenue. State law limits tax-levy increases to half of the average cost-of-living numbers for the previous three years, Pence said.

A 3.8 percent increase in total property tax dollars gets the county to the maximum legal limit calculated by the state.

Pence said the property tax increase of $11.51 for a $200,000 market-value home is a mathematical calculation that will vary from one taxpayer to another based on the property owner’s actual taxable valuation set by the Department of Revenue.

“New construction provides significant new tax dollars that affect the actual county tax increases for individual taxpayers,” Pence said.

The county’s capital improvement budget for the coming year is $6.4 million, compared to just over $8 million last year.

“This is the first budget in a long time that does not include a significant building or large infrastructure project,” Pence said.

At the top of the county’s capital project list is the justice of the peace office space. That department was slated to get a large part of the vacated county attorney’s space in the Justice Center, but the county instead took the space for a 40-bed jail addition.