Two committees of the Jefferson County Quorum Court voted Tuesday night to send the juvenile justice center’s proposed 2012 budget back with instructions to cut that budget by $300,000.
The proposed budget for the juvenile center for next year was $2,219,920, an increase of $19,569 over what the quorum court approved for this year. Of that, $1,082,813 was devoted to salaries and benefits for employees, and an additional $350,000 for maintenance and operational costs.
The decision to send the budget back came after a lengthy discussion in the Public Safety/Emergency Services Committee that began after committee chairman Dr. Herman Ginger started comparing actual expenditures for the first 10 months of this year to the requested budget for next year.
According to Ginger, the center had spent $1,538,702.72 through the end of October, an average of more than $150,000 per month. Projecting that they would spend about the same amount for November and December, Ginger said the total expenditures for the year would be about $1.8 million, or about $300,000 less than what the center asked for previously. County Treasurer Elizabeth Rinchuso said the money for the center is primarily funded from sales tax collections, because the center doesn’t have a source to generate funds to cover expenses.
County Judge Mike Holcomb said the county has had to send the juvenile center more than $400,000 in sales tax monies in the past two months after being ordered to by the court.
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“It’s not an appropriation problem, it’s a cash flow problem,” Rinchuso said, explaining that whatever the quorum court budgeted for the center had to be set aside from sales tax proceeds and could not be used for any other purpose.
“So we’re actually tying up funds that could be used other places,” Justice of the Peace Alfred Carroll said.
Justice of the Peace Ted Harden, who is a member of the court’s Finance Committee, said that the county’s legislators have not been comparing actual budgets to actual budgets because a recommended budget for each agency or department is approved by legislators at the end of the year, and the following year, many of the budgets have to be supplemented.
“Last year we approved a just over $12 million budget and so far this year, we have supplemented that budget another $900,000 so what we’re actually looking at is a $13 million budget,” Harden said. “What we’ve got to get is a realistic budget that people can live by.”
Ginger and the other committee members, Justices Sissy Granderson and the Rev. H.O. Gray voted to send the juvenile budget back to be cut by $300,000, with Granderson saying the cut should be made “unless there were extenuating circumstances.”
That recommendation carried over to the Finance Committee of the county’s legislative body who also voted to send the budget back, and to have a new budget prepared before the court meets again next Monday at 5:30 p.m.
The Finance Committee also recommended that a $12,588,041.06 budget for 2012 for the county be approved next Monday. That figure includes $9,067,242.61 in County General and $3,520,798 for the County Road Department.
Holcomb noted that with a $4,494,339 budget for the adult jail and the proposed $2.2 million for the juvenile center, half of the 2012 budget is devoted to housing prisoners.