Hart County Struggles With Low Fund Balances in Another Tight Fiscal Year

The FY15 budget may have passed in Hart County, but according to County Administrator Jon Caime, the county is running low on its reserve funds.

Caime said Tuesday an economic recession coupled with six years sorting out a tangled property reval and property re-assessment has cost the county millions in lost revenue.

Now, he says key fund balances are running very low.

“With the recession, that was one problem, but at the same time we had the property tax mess,” he said. “And we spent $1.5 million on the property tax mess.  All that said, we’ve kept our General Fund stable, but we’ve drawn it down to what we believe are minimum reserves.”

But Caime said other reserve funds have been tapped over the past six years to help keep county services going.

“We’ve continued to eat away at the reserves we have in the Solid Waste Fund,” Caime said. “The Insurance Premium Fund, we took a good bit of our road wages, we took $600,000 in County road expenses and put it over from the General Fund over into the 203 Fund and we brought that down pretty dramatically.”

Another fund, the 911 fund is below the desired level as well according to Caime, not only because of the economy, but because fewer people use landlines.

“Originally it was all land lines and everybody paid a 911 fee and it was pretty stable,” he said. “Then everybody started using cellphones and the fee went over to that. Then everybody started texting and using cellphones less. Now there’s less revenue in there. We’re getting to the point where our 911 Fund is almost depleted this fiscal year.”

That has left the county in a critical situation with low cash reserves, property tax revenue is flat and to complicate matters all the temporary digests have the left the county not knowing exactly how much revenue they could count on.

Caime said they have been able to collect about $700,000 in back property tax revenue this year for 2009-2011, but the county is still owed over a half million in back taxes for this year.

“We still have back taxes to collect,” he said. “There’s about $1.6 – $2 million dollars outstanding including what’s owed to the Board of Education. The County is looking to collect about $600,000 which is what owed to us.”

Despite all of that, Caime said there will not be a millage increase this year, but there will be more belt tightening and possibly more cut backs in personnel.