County eyes $98M budget

No property tax increase in proposal

Kootenai County commissioners are proposing a $98 million budget for fiscal year 2021, coming in $2.6 million under last year’s budget and with a 0% property tax increase.

“It took some gut-wrenching to get to where we did and the honest answer is you can do zero once in a while but not every year,” Kootenai County Commissioner Chris Fillios said. “We felt that at least for this year, this is the best decision for the people of Kootenai County.”

Despite a growth rate of 2.5%, commissioners said they collectively believed this wasn’t the year to raise taxes.

“Our current estimation is a pretty tiny number when you consider the billions and billions of dollars of property value,” Kootenai County Finance Director Dena Darrow said. “The commissioners have been extremely conservative in this year’s budget, we had to cut back on a lot of stuff.”

The county is also looking at an almost 55% reduction in new capital expenditure, cutting last year’s $10.7 million to $4.9 million.

“We just said this is not the year to be doing a bunch of big projects, this is the year to sit back and wait to see what happens,” Darrow said.

Last year, the county ran a wage study that found its employees were being paid nearly 20% below the market of other governments. This is largely due to the $9 million balance of foregone taxes Kootenai County hadn’t taken in years. After giving out some raises last year, the county budgeted $110,602 in the fiscal year 2021 to fully implement the study.

“For years there were no raises, and if there was they were nothing,” Darrow said. “So you have a huge amount of money we haven’t taken in taxes and very highly underpaid employees.”

Officials are additionally putting in place three separate cost-of-living-adjustments for elected officials, sworn officials, and general payment plan employers and solid waste management workers.

Elected officials will see a 2% cost-of-living adjustment, for example increasing county commissioners’ annual salary from $75,044 to $76,544.

“I don’t know that it’s a big thing that we still have employees underpaid,” Fillios said. “I do think it’s appreciated that during this time where people are applying for unemployment that we can still employ and pay our workers well.”

Overall, commissioners said Kootenai County is keeping its budget fairly lean in hopes to counteract unexpected purchases or financial downturns in the future.

A final meeting to consider adopting the budget is set for July 31 at the Kootenai County Government Building.

“We’re trying to keep the wheels on the bus this year, pretty much,” Darrow said. “This is the year everybody is hurting. We’re looking at what do we positively have to do this year and what are some of those bigger purchases we can hold off on, hopefully, some wheels won’t fall off.”