Floyd County Supervisors discuss budget options with sheriff

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

The Floyd County Board of Supervisors again spent several hours at the board’s regular meeting Monday morning going through budget numbers, talking about wages and shifting numbers between budget accounts.

The board agreed that Supervisor Chair Dennis Keifer would send a message to all the department heads asking them to look for ways to cut 1% to 1.25% from their proposed budgets, and talked with the county sheriff about his staff pay requests and ways he might be able to reduce his budget, such as delaying a squad car purchase to another year.

The board is trying to cut spending by about $200,000 to bring it closer to the amount of taxes collected in the current fiscal year and keep property taxes as low as possible.

The first public hearing on the proposed budget for the 2025-26 fiscal year will take place next Monday, March 24, at 8:30 a.m. in the supervisors’ boardroom in the courthouse, although the meeting could be moved into the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in the connected Law Enforcement Center if the hearing attendance requires more space.

In the state-required notice of public hearing published regarding the budget, the formula required to be used by the county shows property owners who live in cities paying up to a 12.59% tax increase, and persons owning property in rural parts of the county paying up to a 12.28% increase.

But County Assessor Brandi Schmidt, who was listening to the meeting on the phone, called in to say that the formula the state required counties to use to estimate next year’s potential tax rate is flawed because it assumes a 10% increase in taxable property valuation.

The formula says someone who paid taxes on a $100,000 house this year will be paying taxes on a $110,000 house, Schmidt said.

“The flaw in that is that you guys are budgeting on 2024 values and we don’t do market increases in 2024 values. You only do market increases on ’23 and ’25, so 99% of properties are not seeing that increase,” she said.

“When you take out the fact that they’re accounting in that math for the 10% increase that didn’t happen, it’s actually only like a 2 or 3% increase in people’s property taxes” based on the amount of money the county is projecting to spend next fiscal year, Schmidt said.

Part of the budget discussion again dealt with wages and whether pay increases for all county employee increases should be kept at the 2.75% that the unionized Secondary Roads Department had agreed to, or whether employees in some departments would get significantly higher raises as requested by their department heads.

The Sheriff’s Office was again a focus, because the Floyd County Compensation Board had recommended a pay increase of 9.33% for the county sheriff as part of the Iowa “Back the Blue” law requiring sheriffs’ pay to be comparable to similar offices in cities and at the state and federal levels.

In Floyd County, deputies in the Sheriff’s Office are paid a percentage of the sheriff’s salary, ranging from 51% for a new deputy who isn’t yet certified to 80% for the chief deputy.

Suggestions in prior weeks have been to reduce the sheriff’s increase to 8% or to even take everyone in the Sheriff’s Office down to the 2.75%.

At the meeting Monday, Sheriff Jeff Crooks said, “I’ve been kind of contacted by some people that maybe my department’s been through the mud here a little bit in this budget process.”

He said people who were listening in on the meeting had also told him they heard supervisors talk about possibly not replacing a deputy who was retiring in a few months.

He said making that decision would significantly increase the safety risk to the other deputies, because it would make it more difficult to have two deputies always on duty to back up each other.

If a deputy has to work by himself and responds to a domestic situation by himself and gets injured, or doesn’t come home that night, “the supervisors are going to be the ones that are going to answer,” Crooks said.

He said even with his current staff there are times when deputies are working alone because of vacations or sickness or a deputy having to travel out of the area on a transfer.

When that happens, “I’m his backup,” Crooks said.

Supervisors also discussed other pay increases Crooks had recommended and asked if there were cuts he could make to his budget.

He suggested a vehicle purchase might be delayed, saving about $67,000 for the cost of a new vehicle and the upfit with lights, siren, radio and other equipment.

Crooks had requested increases for jailers from their current $22 an hour to $29 per hour, and for office secretaries from their current $23.60 per hour to $29.

He said those were asks, not demands, and his people realized they might get something less.

But if the supervisors held jailers’ increases at 2.75%, at least two of them would leave for other counties where they would be paid more, he said.

Crooks had also requested an additional jailer, saying even with one more he was below where he needed to be to staff the jail with two jailers at all times. Now, deputies fill in in the jail when needed.

Still, he said, the jailers had told him that if they could get good raises they’d be willing to continue working without another jailer.

Supervisors have been struggling to cut spending to minimize any property tax increase but also to keep county budgets at a 25% carryover balance going into the new fiscal year which begins July 1.

While not a law, the supervisors – like most Iowa counties – have a policy of keeping 25% of their budget in carryover funds to get them through the first quarter before property taxes start being paid in September.

The county’s general fund and general supplemental funds are both at or over the 25% figure in the currently proposed budget numbers, but the rural services budget is slightly below that figure.

The problem the supervisors are facing is that there are fewer things they can move in and out to affect the rural services fund, which is paid by owners of property outside city corporate limits.