Commission chair unhappy with budget format
- Charlene Sims, Journal staff
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
By Charlene Sims, Journal staff
MOUND CITY – As three department heads prepared to give their budget requests to the Linn County Commissioners on Monday, July 20, Commission Chair Alison Hamilton asked County Clerk Chasity Ware if she had anything (packet) of what she was asking for. Commissioner Jason Hightower was not at the meeting.
Ware answered, “I do not have a packet ready for you. I can put one together after visiting with David (former County Clerk David Lamb) who is helping us with the budget. He did share that there’s not actually a budget or a packet that is given to you ahead of time.
“The department heads will need to present their budgets. You will tentatively approve or not approve their budget. So then he can take what they are requesting and you are approving or not approving and then be able to decide where the budget needs to go for the county as a whole.”
“OK, so I’ll speak for myself,” Hamilton said. “How we had it last year when Scot Loyd brought in everything. We had it in front of us. We knew the mill. We knew the mill. We knew everything. We had it all in front of us where all the departments were going.
“I feel like I’m seeing the budgets presented to me and I’m just kind of doing this on a whim. I have no idea where I’m really at. So, I personally would rather see that. Jim, I don’t know where you’re at, but we’re accountable for all the money.
“And I feel like I’ll hear you. I heard district court, and it’s like I don’t have anything in front of me to kind of decipher. It’s not your problem. It’s not. It’s just as a county, I want to see what we saw last year.”
Commissioner Jim Johnson questioned Linn County Health Department Director Amanda Snyder about whether the salaries were in her budget. Snyder showed him on the handout where they were located. The health department budget was not on the computer, Snyder had given them a printed copy..
Snyder told the commissioners that she would send an update budget because she missed putting the remainder of the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) income for this year and the proposed WIC income for next year.
“So that was a big difference,” Snyder said. “So I guess I just need to know do you want me to go through all of this line by line? What do you want from me? Or just tell where I’m at and then once David’s able to put it into the whole….”
“Well, to me, I don’t like the way David did it,” Hamilton said..” I don’t, I just don’t. So if I’m requesting something, Jacklyn (County Counselor Jacklyn Paletta), can I have it presented to me in a certain way from the clerk? Regarding the budget. If I want something I can ask for it.”
Paletta answered, “If the commission wants it.”
Hamilton asked Johnson, “Okay Jim, I just need to know if you want to see or if you want to just do. . . . “
“I’m good with seeing it,” he said. ”I’ll tell you what. I’ve been on the phone lots of times this week with people interested in the Kansas Policy Institute (KPI) coming down and having a workshop and all they’re going to do is talk about places we can, if we choose to, to cut budget.”
“Well, and that’s the thing too,” Hamilton said. “You know, we had asked for Dave (Dave Trabert, CEO of the KPI) to come in and I had messaged Chasity about that too. You know, it’s like I thought we were going to see him in here and then we kind of let that go, which is fine if he doesn’t.
“But if we have the time, but we’re just getting so short on time as far as putting this all together. I just feel like I haven’t seen hard numbers, total budget, what we’re working with. And when I see the district court come in and they didn’t increase ,which is great, but I need to see it in front of me.”
On June 29 Ware said that district court representatives asked to come before the commission with its budget for 2027. However, Hamilton asked Ware to create a folder for each department and said that departments could start coming in the second week of July. On July 6 there was no meeting because of a lack of a quorum. The court delegation appeared at the July 13 meeting and Hamilton said she didn’t have any concerns with the budget.
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Hamilton reminded Ware on Monday that she sent her a sample of the kind of budget document she wanted.
Ware answered, “You sent it to me Friday afternoon but there was no way David (Lamb) was going to have that prepared for this morning. So I will forward that on to him. But I do want to give you an update in regards to Dave Trabert.
“He and I spoke on Friday morning. He is more than happy to come down and provide what he will call a workshop or a town hall. He can do it the week of Aug. 10 or Aug. 17. He will speak to the public and be informative. He would ask that we invite all elected officials. He will not provide exactly what needs to be cut, but will share ways to go about doing it.
“He suggests that it be an evening situation, not a commissioner’s meeting.”
“Well to be honest with you,” Hamilton said. “I don’t have a problem with him coming in but I showed up to the last meeting and I heard what he had to say, and it was zero balance budget. The commissioners had done a great job. This really falls on the schools exceeding revenue neutral every year over $3 million for the past four years I think it was. The county hasn’t increased at all for four to five years or exceeded revenue neutral rate. So he didn’t tell us to really do anything.
“Now, I’m okay with him coming in here because the only thing that really needs to be publicly known here is how the schools and the libraries and all the things locally, they have their own taxing units. They can do that.
“They can exceed revenue neutral themselves so it’s more of an education for the county to listen. And if it’s just the same people that show up to Dave and I’m the only one that shows up to get ripped by the community, I’m not interested. I’m not.”
Johnson said he had a mental health meeting to attend and couldn’t attend Trabert’s presentation.
The discussion about Trabert coming and doing another town meeting continued with Hamilton blaming the other government entities in the county for increased taxes.
Trabert and the conservative think-tank KPI are critical of the state’s public school systems and support using tax dollars to give low-income students vouchers to attend private schools.
The organization for the 2024-25 school year gave a C grade to all four elementary schools in the county and to both the high school and middle school in the Prairie View district. It gave D grades to Pleasanton and Jayhawk-Linn high schools but did not separate out the junior high schools..
After standing at the podium for 10 minutes while Hamilton and Johnson discussed their other concerns, Snyder was allowed to continue with her budget.
Snyder reported that her budget for 2027 was projected to be just under $428,100. Her payroll line item for full-time, part-time and overtime was almost $301,900 with a 3% cost of living adjustment (COLA). She said her contractual and utilities was nearly $71,200, up almost $6,500 from last year because of increases to insurance, annual costs for the electronic health record system and funds for possibly repairing the generator like they did this year.
Snyder said that the commodity line item had gone up $6,600 for postage, emergency supplies and funds to include the additional grants the department hoped to receive. She explained a capital outlay fund that the health department has that currently has $20,000, which is set aside for larger expenses for the building, the generator or vaccine refrigerator.
Snyder told the commissioners that she will send them the updated figures but that the total income for the health department is budgeted to be just over $227,900 for 2027.
When she was finished, Johnson asked Hamilton what more she wanted to see.
Hamilton answered, “From hers? I’m just looking there it looks pretty good. I have questions. I look at like the CANVA subscription just wonder if, is there a nonprofit that we could use so you don’t have to pay for that or how many ChatGPT subscriptions do we have in the county?”
Hamilton told Snyder, “Very organized as usual, Thank you!”
The next budget for 2027 from Register of Deeds Debbie Snyder.
Snyder told the commissioners, “I’m kind of like Amanda, I don’t really know what you want.”
Hamilton pulled it up in the SharePoint program on her computer while Snyder explains that the total budget for the Register of Deed office for 2027 was going to increase $6,000 from last year’s budget.
Snyder said the increases were due to 3% COLA increases for the three employees and the two step increases for the two employees. She said that without the COLA increase the increase would be nearly $4,500.
The other reasons for the increase is that the office went from two part-time employees to two full-time employees and also the increase in postage and other costs.
Wages are up the difference without the COLA $4,500, but the figures under the 2027 have the COLA and the two step raises, she said. So the budget went up $6,000 some from the previous year.
First page was the total fees collected for 2025
And the reason for the increase well mainly it was payroll but because we went from two part-time to two full-time employees and then of course with postage going up and everything going up.
As Snyder concluded her report, Johnson asked Hamilton, “We need to tentatively approve these, don’t we? We always have.”
Hamilton moved on to the next budget report which was Information Technology Director Chris Martin. Hamilton and Johnson were viewing it on their computers.
Martin started with an update that 828 tickets had been opened year-to-date in 2026 and 815 of those have been closed. He then reported on projects that his department was working on presently.
Martin reported that basically everything remained roughly the same other than what is anticipated for a 5% to 10% increase in cost for some items. He pointed out that the total budget went down from last year’s budget.
Martin said the one big cost will be the VM server for the backup domain controllers and database server and $15,000 was budgeted for that last year.