Jackson Passes $6M Budget For New Fiscal Year

Jackson County passed a $6 million county budget for the new fiscal year Monday night.

The budget includes a 2 percent pay raise for general county employees. County Mayor Randy Heady said the change in state law concerning internet sales tax helped the county’s revenues.

“The port of origin sales tax, if you buy something and you live in rural Jackson County and it’s delivered to your doorstep, then Jackson County gets the sales tax off of that,” Heady said. “So that really helped us. That took effect in October and that made a big difference in their sales tax.”

Heady said revenue projections looked good early but he wanted to wait to verify the numbers before passing the budget.

“I started seeing early on that our revenues were looking really good, our projections was looking good and and but we wanted to wait,” Heady said. “That’s one of the reasons we passed late. We historically pass right now. This is the time we always do it. But it seemed to be more of an important this year because we want to make sure that our revenues came in like we had projected in and maybe even better. And they did.”

Heady said working with each county department proved easier that he would have expected when COVID shutdown things just prior to budget time

“I’m excited to have it behind me, you know,” Heady said. “It’s been kind of a crazy time and you wonder how are you going to be able to do budget process through this? But it went really well. And I’ve got a great commission to work with. So I’m I’m excited about getting this behind us.”

Heady said his biggest disappointment was not getting a raise to Jackson County School teachers. The legislature cut raises to balance the state budget.