Lancaster County commissioners have dipped their toes into their new budget process.
The County Board began its annual finance planning Thursday with presentations from four of eight joint city-county departments: Information Services, Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department, the Library and Building & Safety Department.
In an effort to prioritize services, cut back on spending and become more hands-on, the County Board this year has revamped its budget process. Commissioners are calling it “service-based budgeting†and fashioned it after the process Lincoln Mayor Chris Beutler instituted when he came into office in 2007.
The board is beginning with joint agencies as a warmup. The joint agencies already ranked their services under the mayor’s direction and are in the middle of the city’s biennial budget.
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The county’s participation in the joint departments is spelled out in intergovernmental agreements and the county is billed for the services they provide. The County Board has little control over the joint agency budgets and in the past few years hadn’t bothered holding budget meetings with them.
For county-only offices and departments, the County Board has demanded services be ranked in order of importance and assigned dollar figures to them to help decide what could be trimmed.
Commission Chairman Todd Wiltgen and Vice Chairman Bill Avery have told officials that budgets must be trimmed to contain spending or risk the board mandating a blanket 3 percent cut.
The board plans to spread budget reviews through June, reviewing a handful each week and giving commissioners more time to dig into the details. Previously, the board jammed all the budgets within two or three days and gave each department about 15 minutes.Ìý
Thursday, each department breezed through its budget in about 30 minutes.
Information Services’ total budget for fiscal year 2017-18 is $7.88 million, about half a percentage point higher than the $7.84 million budgeted for this fiscal year. The county’s share, based on the services that departments use, for fiscal year 2017-18 is budgeted at $2.379 million, up 7 percent from $2.228 million this fiscal year.
The Health Department has projected a total budget of $14.546 million for the upcoming year, about 3 percent less than the $14.926 million budgeted for this year.
The county’s portion of the Health Department budget for next year is listed as $2.459 million, 17 percent lower than the current $2.959 million.
Commissioner Jennifer Brinkman asked Health Department Director Judy Halstead about health disparities in different parts of the county and what services could use more support.
Halstead replied there are three areas that could benefit from a cash infusion. The first is the understaffed animal control (which the county does not contribute to financially), sexually transmitted infection programs and dental services for low-income residents.
“Chlamydia is our most communicable disease in our jurisdiction. It’s the same in Douglas County and the same in the state of Nebraska,†Halstead said.
The department has the funds to treat people who visit clinics, but not the funding for outreach and follow-up to ensure prescriptions are taken and sexual partners are contacted to help stop the spread of the disease.
Lancaster County pays the Lincoln Library so rural residents can have access to its books and services. The county taxes rural areas to pay the bill, which is budgeted as $798,471 for next fiscal year, 3 percent more than the $776,770 this fiscal year. The library levy this fiscal year is 1.7 cents per $100 of assessed property value.
Services the Building and Safety Department provide for the county, such as building and electrical inspections, generally are covered by service fees. The county has agreed to pay the difference if those fees don’t cover costs, but that has not happened since 2013.