Linn County plans for no new staff or initiatives in drafting 2025 budget

Heading into the process of drafting budgets for fiscal 2025 — for the year spanning July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025 — the Linn County Board of Supervisors is anticipating no spending on new staff or initiatives.

Earlier this year, for the current fiscal 2024 budget — covering the time period from July 1 through June 30, 2024 — the three-member board quickly made proposed spending cuts after already drafting a budget to fill a $1.74 million gap from a bill correcting a state error that left local governments down millions in expected revenue.

The supervisors in March approved discretionary spending cuts to travel, training, vehicles, vacancies and several grant programs.

Supervisor Chair Louie Zumbach last week proposed county departments prepare their 2025 budgets without the $1.74 million in cuts.

“By reinstating the cuts that we made, that demonstrates a good-faith effort on this board to return those important dollars back to the elected officials and departments that made those cuts knowing that if we hit those growth factors that could be problematic that those could be looked at again,” Supervisor Ben Rogers said, supporting Zumbach’s proposal.

Departments would refer back to fiscal 2024 originally proposed budgets as their baseline. These budgets would be preliminary and not final until valuation growth figures are in, which the county wouldn’t know likely until late December.

Budget Director Sara Bearrows said there would be no spending increase in operations other than contractual increases for maintenance or software contracts or utilities, for example.

The supervisors supported a 3 percent pay bump as a preliminary placeholder for nonbargaining unit employees — the elected officials and their deputies whose pay increases are first subject to a recommendation by the Linn County Compensation Board. The supervisors can OK the recommendations or decrease all of them by the same amount. The board also can lower its own pay independent of the other elected officials’ salaries.

Based on state legislation Iowa lawmakers passed this year, Bearrows said the county’s levy growth could be reduced based on three tiers of growth in property assessments:

Rogers said if the county knew these spending cuts would be permanent, the choices made in the spring may have been different. County Treasurer Brent Oleson told the supervisors last week that it would “be really problematic for a lot of departments” not to have training or travel added back into department budgets.

Supervisor Kirsten Running-Marquardt supported this and said more tough conversations are likely, but the supervisors wanted to start at the baseline budget and carefully decide spending cuts together.

“I think that we’re going to have to have those conversations with many of our departments and many of our electeds,” Running-Marquardt said. “I know that we can come to find good solutions.”

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