GATE CITY — The Scott County Board of Supervisors passed a balanced budget for fiscal year 2012-13 last week that avoids tax hikes while still increasing funding for education.
Supervisors voted unanimously to adopt the $22.3 million overall budget, which represents a jump of 10.8 percent over last year’s budget. That jump was fueled in large part by $6.3 million in local match funding that was given to Scott County Public Schools and a state-mandated increase in Virginia Retirement System contributions.
The county’s actual operating expenditures total $11.8 million. Included in that amount is $5.1 million in funding for public safety and $2.1 million for public works.
The overall budget for fiscal year 2011-12 came in at $20.1 million.
Despite the higher expenditures, Supervisor at-large Chad Hood said the board passed a “lean budget” that kept core county services while forgoing items that were not deemed essential.
“Our budget is lean, and it’s been lean for the past four of five years,” Hood said. “We did that by going into each line item throughout the entire budget, and we tried to whittle it down — whether it was $200 there or $500 here. When you do that it’s going to add up to some savings.”
The budget adopted for the current fiscal year maintains real estate property tax rates at 69 cents per $100 of value, while personal property tax rates remain at $1.40 per $100. The merchant’s capital and machinery and tools tax was also kept at its current rate of 72 cents.
Supervisors project those rates will yield $8.3 million from real property tax collections and another $1 million from personal property taxes. Other local taxes are expected to bring in just over $3 million.
Hood said the board wanted to avoid dipping into the county’s general fund balance but couldn’t due to the additional funding requested by the school board.
After denying an initial request for $3.3 million in additional school funding, the board agreed to give the system $1.6 million over the amount mandated by the state.
Supervisors granted that funding under the condition that the school board would look for ways to further reduce its expenditures before fiscal year 2013-14.
That extra money for education, along with $80,000 used to cover a gap in revenue, was taken from the county’s general fund balance.
“I wasn’t happy that we had to dip into the general fund, but the circumstances we were presented with the 5 percent VRS increase and all that, it worked out fine for this year,” Hood said.