MANSFIELD — The Richland County Board of Commissioners on Thursday unanimously approved a balanced general fund budget for 2025, a spending plan that reflects a 3.2 percent increase over the original 2024 budget.
The budget of $46,092,642 matches projected revenues for next year, according to the three-member board.
The commissioners have previously adopted a policy that requires them to balance the budget each year, i.e. not appropriating more than they and other county officials expect to generate in revenue.
By comparison, the county budgeted $44.6 million at the beginning of 2024, though commissioners have projected a budget surplus at the end of this year of around $8.4 million as actual revenues are expected to come in around $49 million.
Actual revenues in recent years were $47.3 million (2023), $41.3 million (2022), $42.2 million (2021) and $39,696,117 (2020).
Commissioners were able to get to the 2025 balanced budget in the last few days through improved revenue forecasts — largely in interest earnings and conveyance fees — from county Treasurer Bart Hamilton and county Auditor Pat Dropsey, as well as a change in the way elected officials and department heads forecast health insurance costs.
(Below is a PDF showing the approved 2025 general fund budget approved by Richland County commissioners on Thursday.)
The change in health insurance budgeting made a significant difference to the county’s bottom line.
“One of the things we asked offices and departments to do was to resubmit their health insurance costs based off of employee plus-spouse instead of family — for new hires only,” Commissioner Tony Vero said.
For example, he said, the change resulted in $600,000 in jail employees alone for 2025. As of this week, there were more than a dozen vacancies in the jail staff.
“They expect to hire employees throughout the year and when they submit their budget, which is fine, they submit for family coverage for the entire year,” Vero said. “We know that’s not realistic.
“We know they’re not going to be fully staffed January 1st and we know, because they just have a large number of employees, that there will be turnover,” he said.
“We felt it was being pretty conservative to say, ‘Submit your health insurance costs for your new hires based off an employee plus-spouse,” he said. “You’re not fully staffed from day one and not everyone takes family coverage.”
The budgeting change will not impact the ability of new county employees from selecting family insurance coverage, commissioners said.
“That is purely a budgeting tool on paper,” county administrator Andrew Keller said. “Any new hires would be entitled to elect their (insurance) benefit as appropriate for them.”
Even with the reduced insurance costs, the county sheriff’s office operations, including road patrol, jail and 9-1-1 dispatch center, remains 40 percent of the general fund budget at $18,724,245.
During a budget meeting with commissioners in late October, Sheriff Steve Sheldon had requested a budget of $21.1 million. That included the purchase of six new vehicles in 2025, which will be considered in the capital budget.
Commissioners allocated $9.6 million for the jail, $7.3 million for patrol and $1.7 million for the dispatching center.
Vero said he believes most elected officials and department heads will be satisfied with the final budget.
“I think the sheriff might be a little concerned with what we appropriated for the jail. They had submitted for more salary. But keep in mind, they are budgeting fully staffed for the entire year.
“Even, I think, (jail administrator Capt. Chris Blunk) and Sheriff Sheldon would say, ‘Look, we’re not going to be fully staffed for the entire year.’
“So while that number may look to be off, we still feel they’ll still have more than enough salaries for everything they want to do,” Vero said.
He said commissioners can always add more to the jail salaries line if needed later in 2025.
“That is the benefit of being conservative because we feel we will be doing a little better than what we budgeted and we’ll be able to appropriate more money.
“We want the jail to be fully staffed. We anticipate the jail to eventually be fully staffed. But we know it won’t be fully staffed come January 1 of 2025.
“But the other departments, other officials, at this point, they’re pretty much getting what they had asked for in their budget requests,” Vero said.
