BOCC approves county budget

WALLACE – The Shoshone Board of County Commissioners approved its annual budget for the 2022/23 fiscal year on Tuesday following a brief public hearing.

All of Shoshone County’s department heads were present in the District Courtroom on Tuesday afternoon, where the first part of the meeting was opened up for public comment.

The draft budget had been previously published in the Shoshone News-Press and copies were publicly available at the courthouse.

During the public comment period, it was brought up that this year’s budget was just over $2 million higher than last year’s — a near 13% increase.

However, that number appears to be more palatable when you begin to break down numbers and understand how a county runs better when it has a full staff getting adequately compensated.

Roughly $1.1 million of that increase came in the form of a 7% raise across the board for all full-time county employees, this includes the revamped pay scale for the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office that was approved earlier this year.

The other $900,000 in total increase is due to a myriad of different reasons — many of them boiling down to the simple increase in cost for materials and fuel.

For example, Shoshone County’s Roads Department, which handles the maintenance of the vast number of miles of roads within Shoshone County — their allotment of budgeted “other expenses” for the coming fiscal year is over $76,000 more than last year — much of that is tied directly to the increased cost of fuel.

With prices on everything increasing, so did each department’s expenses.

“We made the decision to invest in our people this year, that is where people are going to see the biggest increase,” said BOCC Chairman Jay Huber. “If you want the cops to come to your house, or you want your roads plowed in the winter, you have to take care of your people. We can’t have a mass exodus of people because we can’t pay them a respectable wage. The rest of the increase really comes down to the world we live in — and we can’t control what things cost. And unfortunately those are things we have to pay for, no matter what they cost. Trucks, police cars and heavy equipment need fuel.”

The department heads, who each set their budgets for approval, were very careful in how they spent money — knowing that things are coming at a higher price tag right now.

“All of our department heads were very frugal, there isn’t any big spending by any of them,” said Commissioner John Hansen. “We haven’t planned for any big purchases this coming year that weren’t already in the works — and we’re doing our best to find other ways to fund a lot of that, instead of using taxpayer dollars.”

It is also worth noting, that since the state of Idaho enacted a new statute effectively doing away with indigent funds, the remaining funds in the county’s indigent fund were rolled into the newly created Justice Fund. That new fund includes the SCSO, Safety Building, Jail and Public Defense.