KINGWOOD — Citing the impact of the coronavirus and declining tax collections, the Preston County Commission took action Wednesday it hopes will avert a fiscal disaster.
“With the coronavirus, we’re hoping and praying that this doesn’t really factor or be a hardship to our budget but just be realistic and [trying to] be very, very conservative, so that we can all continue to move forward,” Commission President Samantha Stone said. “The goal is we want to keep everybody employed.
We want to be able to withstand this storm that we’re going into.”
Beginning immediately, commissioners put a freeze on all new hiring, all non-essential work-related travel, non-essential overtime in all departments and all non-essential expenditures.
Commissioners will only approve essential expenditures in payroll. maintenance and repair of buildings, grounds and equipment, custodial supplies, utilities, fuel and auto supplies and contracted services for such things as IT and maintenance, lease payments for vehicles, leasing space for early voting if needed and payment for election equipment.
Emergency spending needs will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
“When you come down to the end of a [fiscal] year, people, offices, elected officials, try to get things they need with money they haven’t spent in their budgets, and right now we need to be very careful with our spending and only buy what is a necessity and not what is a want,” Stone said after the meeting.
In addition, she and Commissioners Dave Price and Don Smith are asking the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation to allow the county to pay only a portion of the March, April, May and June regional jail bills. The rest would be paid by Dec. 31, under the commission’s proposal.
Commissioners also announced that Kathy Mace will suspend her retirement and return as full-time administrator May 1 at a reduced pay. Mace, who retired in June 2019, was to work part-time afterwards.
She has been interim administrator since Shannon Wolfe resigned in November.
Preston allocated more than $800,000 for regional jail bills this fiscal year. The 2020-21 budget includes $750,000 for regional jail fees. The monthly bill varies from $50,000 to $80,000 a month, Stone said.
“Our budget moving into the next fiscal year is less than what we are currently working with,” Stone noted. The county wants, “Just for those last few months, to hold onto enough to be sure that we have enough money to pay our employees and to pay the bills.”
If Preston pays the entire jail bill monthly, “with revenues slowing — they’re not coming in as they typically do this time of year — and with the extension that the governor put on taxes being paid, that’s going to get us behind the eight ball. And we want to be sure that we can pay our bills.”
Mace agreed to take a pay cut, from $30 per hour to $28, through June 30.
“I’m willing to do that through this period of time because I know that our revenues are shrinking,” Mace said after the meeting. “That was at my request because I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.”
The commission has come under fire for not funding the county health department and volunteer fire departments in the 2020-21 budget.
“Right now I’m not looking at it as a cut; I’m looking at it as it wasn’t there to fund,” Stone said. “Taking money away from them, we hope that it is on a temporary basis.
“We are just trying to play it safe at this point,” Stone said.
TWEET @DominionPostWV
