Nursing home would bear half of proposed county budget cut

LACONIA — A committee of the Belknap County Delegation says it has come up with a budget plan which will result in a tax break for the county’s 11 communities. While cuts are being proposed all across the budget, half would come from the county nursing home.

The delegation’s Executive Committee is proposing a spending package that cuts roughly $1.7 million from the budget offered by the county commissioners, and cuts $3.5 million from the amount that needs to be raised by taxes — a decrease of 11 percent from the county’s total tax levy last year, state Rep. Ray Howard, the Executive Committee’s chairman, said Tuesday.

The committee’s plan is scheduled to be presented next Tuesday at a meeting of the full 18-member delegation, which is composed of the county’s representatives in the state House.

Howard said the line-item cuts affected all county departments.

In addition to the cuts in spending, the revised budget anticipates an additional $750,000 in revenue, compared to commissioners’ budget.

Howard said the committee considered the cuts prudent,  and said last year the county spent $900,000 less than what had been budgeted.

For big-ticket items, the committee left in money to replace the boiler and install a generator for the County Nursing Home. But it cut money that would have been used for new windows at the nursing home or work on the masonry at the county Court House.

The County Commission is expected to discuss the committee’s recommendation when the commission meets Thursday.

In the meantime, County Administrator Debra Shackett said the commissioners would be reviewing the committee recommendation to determine what impact they might have on the operations of county departments, which in addition to the Nursing Home, include the Department of Corrections, and the Sheriff’s Department.

She said half of the cuts being proposed by the committee will affect the nursing home.

If the commissioners concluded that any of the cuts would hurt the level of services, she expected they would make their case why those funds should be restored.

Howard said some of the cuts in committee’s recommendations came in what he called payroll adjustments.

Shackett said that some of those savings might be realized by not filling certain positions. But she said the commissioners would scrutinize those proposed changes to see if existing positions would also be affected.

“The commission will be asking for funds to keep people employed who are already employed,” she said.

While the county was hit last year by an unanticipated $2 million cut in nursing home revenue from the state, it was able to make up about half of that loss through federal funds it received from COVID relief legislation passed by Congress in the first half of last year.

But Shackett said she is not anticipating the county will  get any federal assistance of that sort this year.

In addition to the $1.7 million in cuts and the additional $750,000 in anticipated revenue, the committee increased from $2 million to $3 million the amount that will be allocated to the county’s fund balance, a sort of reserve fund that can be used to decrease taxes or drawn on to make up for any budget shortfall.