Commission's back up again wall as budget deadline looms
By Charlene Sims, Journal staff
MOUND CITY – After a marathon eight-hour Linn County Commission meeting on Monday, Sept. 14, the commissioners did not come to a consensus on the budget except that they approved resolutions that the county and the rural fire department would exceed revenue neutral.
That gives commissioners time to look again at lowering the tax collected to be near or at revenue neutral by Oct. 1 deadline when the approved budget is required by state statute to be turned into the county clerk.
In its legal notice, the commission was to hold separate hearings on both exceeding the revenue neutral rate and the proposed county budget. While there was general discussion about the budget during the final six hours of the Sept. 14 meeting, it happened during the hearing to exceed revenue neutral rate. No budget hearing was formally called into session on that day, and the commissioners did not approve a budget for 2027.
At the previous week’s meeting on Sept. 8, the commissioners were far from finalizing the budget and had hoped to do it on Sept. 14. Commission Chair Alison Hamilton pondered whether it was really necessary to meet the Oct. 1.
“They want us to make a motion next week,” Hamilton said. “I’m not in favor, I’m not ready to make a motion next week. But if you guys are, that’s fine. I’ve got a lot of questions.”
“But if we don’t approve it, there isn’t anything that happens to the county,” she added. “She (County Clerk Chasity Ware) gets a letter. She gets reprimanded, somewhat, there’s no fine. It’s the same story with the appraiser. We can work on it through what October?”
“Monday (Sept. 14) would be the day by which you all would have to make the motion to approve the budget and exceed revenue neutral,” County Counselor Jacklyn Paletta said. “So that motion would have to happen on Monday if you were all going to exceed revenue neutral. If you’re not going to exceed revenue neutral, then if there’s not a motion then you would not exceed revenue neutral and you would be stuck with the mill levy from last year.”
Commissioner Jason Hightower asked, “And if we do not make the motion to exceed revenue neutral and then cut more out of the budget and don’t exceed revenue neutral, what’s the problem?”
Commissioner Jim Johnson asked the same question, “If we make that statement that we are going to exceed and then we end up being revenue neutral, is that an issue?”
Paletta answered the only issue is that you are approving the budget so you’re either approving the budget with the monies or you’re not.
Hamilton argued, “We’ve already done the motion to exceed, but you can cut back, Monday’s the deadline. But if we don’t make a motion either way it doesn’t matter. It would matter to Chasity.”
The commission has traditionally started work in earnest on the budget in late July and August, voting on a motion to approve the budget well ahead of deadline. The city clerks and school board clerks across Linn County have been doing just that and by now all of those budgets have been finalized and adopted by city councils and school boards.
However, under Hamilton’s direction that mid-summer process was delayed because she wasn’t satisfied with the documents department heads were submitting as preliminary budget requests.
During the meeting on Sept. 8, commissioners brought up several questions, including whether $450,000 should be taken out of the 2027 budget for the landfill closing because that was already in the budget.
Other questions at that meeting, mainly from Johnson, were concerns about the health department budget, $2.2 million that Johnson did not understand where it came from, the large increase in employee benefits switching retirement benefits for deputies and firefighters to the Kansas Police and Firemen’s Retirement System fund that he voted for, and his concerns about where the income from the jail goes in the county’s budget as well as the payments paid from the school districts for the school resource officers. Many of these concerns had been discussed previously the past few weeks.
Paletta reminded them that, “She (Ware) ultimately has to submit the approved budget to the state by the deadline. Like you all signed like you did last year and so that’s kind of the rub is that you will all ultimately approve a budget, the budget that’s approved is the one by which the treasurer’s office is going to actually going to be assessing/receiving the monies from the taxpayers.”
(Last year, in the confusion with a new clerk, publication missteps and other issues, videos of the commission meeting do not show the commissioners actually making and approving a motion to approve the 2026 budget, and yet no action was taken by the state to make the county stick with the mill levy for 2025.)
Shortly after Hamilton called the revenue neutral hearing to order on Monday, Sept. 14, David Lamb, former county clerk and current consultant to the clerk’s office, pointed out the process to be followed for the revenue neutral hearing and budget hearing.
Lamb explained, “The next steps would be voting on whether to exceed revenue neutral on the county and on the rural fire budget. Recording that vote on these sheets on how each person voted and then if you are voting to exceed there is a resolution to be passed for each one of them. Then after that is done you actually open up for a budget hearing because this was just the revenue neural hearing.”
Ware asked Lamb, “If they want to visit the budget prior to voting we can do that now? They wanted to go over this part. So we can do that now prior to this.”
Lamb said they could review the budget before voting on revenue neutral.
At the start of the revenue neutral hearing, Hamilton called the hearing to order and opened up comment for the public to speak. Each speaker was given five minutes.
The first person to speak was Bill Arnold from rural Parker. Arnold told the commissioners that his tax bill went up 20% last year and 20% this year, which he thought was high.
“Part of my concern is that I got on line and looked at the average taxes in Linn County online,” he said. “I saw on the internet, we all know you can trust a little bit of it, not a lot. It showed that the average real estate tax was $1,800 a year. Mine is $5,600. Seems awfully excessive.
“Don’t misunderstand, I want good roads, I want good schools. I have no students going to school here and never have. But I want there to be good schools, good roads, police protection, all that. It just seems like maybe it’s a little out of balance to me. Like my fair share being three, four times what the average is, assuming that the numbers that I got there are close or fairly accurate.
“It does seem to me, I’ve read some of the articles in the paper that I’m sure all of you have about the cost of taxes in Linn County being high, the percentages being high. I’m not as much worried about that. I do want you guys to do a good job spending the money that you get. I mean, I want you to be efficient with it. I don’t mind paying my fair share. Right now, I think I’m paying more than that, so I came here to see if I could get, you know, just a little balance.
Arnold said he paid the real estate taxes onthis place when he bought it from the owner who had 160 acres. He said he only had 10 acres and his taxes were as high as the previous owner with more land. However, online county records show that Arnold applied for building permits in June 2024 for an agricultural building, in a couple months later for a new barn, and in July 2025 for a 1,728 square foot pole barn.
The next speaker was Eric who did not want to give his last name. He said he is a resident of Mound City. Eric told the commissioners he was a victim of the Jackson County, Mo., property tax fiasco and before moving to Linn County he had some questions. He wanted to know why the Mound City Township, Cemetery and the library were being defunded. He asked why Mound City was losing the taxes for these entities.
Lamb answered that the form Eric was looking at was the revenue neutral notice and that those entities were not being defunded, they were just not exceeding revenue neutral.
Eric said he thought the forms were incorrect and should be corrected. Having been from Jackson County, he also asked that Linn County limit the number of software companies that they bring in as consultants to help you understand anything about property taxes. He told the commissioners that as soon as the county starts outsourcing software companies and relying on their data in addition to data you are getting from realtors, the information becomes skewed.
After closing public comment, the commission started by pulling up the commissioners budget and discussing that a cost of living adjustment (COLA) had been added in.
The consensus of the commissioners was to remove COLAs from any department budget that had them added in. So COLAs were removed from the following budgets: commissioners, health department, register of deeds, rural fie and county clerk’s office. Then they finished discussing the commission’s budget.
They continued then through each department but made no final decision on the whole budget. They only came to the point where they recognized that they needed more time and agreed to approve going over revenue neutral for the county and rural fire department.
Comments