Hunter Taylor: Compromise on county budget was a one-sided affair

To The Daily Sun,

The Belknap County Delegation’s handling of the 2021 budget has been more disheartening than usual. The commissioners proposed a budget with a modest increase (from $30.8 to $32 million), $2 million lower than the second lowest county budget in NH. Rejecting that proposal, the delegation passed a budget almost $2 million less than requested, and almost $600,000 lower than the 2020 budget.

The commissioners know from experience that their proposed budget must be not just frugal, but bare bones, as the level of scrimping has been made clear. Most NH counties have a management team of County Administrator, Finance Director, and Human Resources Director; all but one have at least two of the three. Belknap, however, operates with just a County Administrator, who wears all three hats but is paid only an average administrator salary.

In recent years, no budget advanced by the commissioners has been small enough to satisfy the delegation. This year, when the delegation was clearly about to pass the grossly inadequate Executive Committee budget, the commissioners and department heads put together the leanest budget believed sufficient for minimal operations without layoffs. This compromise budget would add $444,824 to the Executive Committee budget, still producing a budget more than $100,000 lower than 2020. The spirit of compromise, however, was one-sided, and the delegation passed the lower budget of $30,256,185 by a 14 to 4 vote.

This inadequate budget has left the beleaguered department heads scrambling to make ends meet and hoping for miracles. County services and programs are likely to be curtailed or ended, and layoffs will be hard to avoid. Maintenance will be put off, only to cost more in the future.

The delegation did all this in the name of cutting taxes, but the rather minuscule tax benefit to the average county resident pales in comparison to the harm produced. An average $300,000 property with a tax rate of $18.75 per $1,000 had a yearly property tax in 2020 of $5,625. $360 of that bill was for county tax. The commissioners’ proposed budget would have raised that amount to $396, an increase of $36. Under the commissioners’ compromise budget, the amount would have been $356, a $4 decrease.

The drastic cuts of the delegation budget take the county tax rate down to $1.07 per $1000, yielding a county tax of $320 on that $300,000 property. That is a savings of $76, or $6.33 per month, in comparison to the commissioners’ budget. In comparison to the compromise budget, the tax savings would be $36 for the year, or $3 per month.

The numbers tell the story, and it is absurd to view the savings produced by the draconian cuts as significant tax relief. So why such drastic cuts? Perhaps an attempt to fool the taxpayers into believing they had been helped? Or perhaps just another step in the dismantling of county government? As someone wiser than I observed, “This is the result you get when the ideologues who don’t believe in government are the government.”

Hunter Taylor

Alton