News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
White County is keeping its budget inline with last year after getting final approval Monday night.
County Commission Chair Stanley Neal said the board shied away from any major additions or cuts in the $55 million dollar budget. It will include some paving projects but no new buildings. Neal said the county worked to keep the property tax rate at $0.205 by avoiding major spending before ensuring higher revenues.
“We’re pretty conservative with our monies and we don’t like to stretch things too thin or put any burden on the citizens,” Neal said. “So we tried to keep things in check.”
Neal said the county was able to avoid making any significant budget cuts because of that funding relief and the level of growth in parts of White County.
“There’s not really a huge change in revenue that we expect,” Neal said. “There has been gains in revenue because of new residential structures going up. That has been a positive for the county over the last couple of years. There’s a lot of growth on the north side of the county, so that has helped.”
Neal said there was consideration to add a new county fire department. However, he said that did not make this budget but it will be looked at again for the 2022-2023 budget.
“We’re not looking at any major capital projects, such as any buildings or anything like that in this budget,” Neal said. “We are planning for the future. There’s some debt services money put back to help with future capital projects, such as additions to buildings or new buildings.”
Also Monday, the county appointed its redistricting committee. The committee will include seven county commissioners, County Executive Denny Wayne Robinson, Election Commissioner Dorcus Marcum and School Board Chairman Jayson Mcdonald.
The committee will meet to reexamine boundaries of county legislative districts or redistrict the county entirely if deemed necessary. The committee chairman will report the status of suggested redistricting plans to the county commission at each regular meeting. The committee must submit its final suggested redistricting plan to the county commission by December 20.
