Shoshone County facing potential budget crisis

WALLACE –– Painful days are ahead for the elected officials and department heads of Shoshone County.

Due to what can only be described at this point as potential oversight, the county finds itself on the verge of a financial crisis.

According to BOCC chairman David Dose, after weeks of reviewing proposals and feeling confident moving forward with approving their proposed $16.5 million county budget, it was brought to the attention of the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), that in its current state and with the proposed various revenue streams, the county would not have the funds to approve such a budget and that they needed to tighten their proposed budget by roughly $3 million.

Dose isn't attaching blame because, at this point, no one seems to know where the actual problem is or where it began.

In 2022, the county budget was passed at approximately $15.5 million, which at the time was a 13% increase from the previous year’s budget – due largely to both record inflation and the previous BOCC giving all of the county’s employees at 7% cost of living adjustment.

With the state deadline for fiscal year budget approval one week away, the county will need to look at each department and figure out how they’re going to take a proposed $16.5 million and whittle it down to $13.5 million in order to legally pass their budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

The BOCC has been busy over the past few days trying to figure out how the county landed in its current position – in the meantime, they tasked the leaders of the various courthouse departments to review their proposals and see if there is anywhere they can trim.

For the past few years, property taxes have been increased at a rate of 3% annually, and even with those increases, the county has reportedly overspent based on what they have coming in.

According to Dose, just looking at the problem from the surface, it appears that the county severely overestimated expected revenues from its various revenue streams.

The BOCC is now looking for an auditor to come in a do a deep dive into the county’s revenues and expenses to find out where everything went sideways.

“We have to find a long-term strategy,” Dose told the News-Press following Monday’s workshop. “We haven’t been paying for the right kind of audit, and we’ve been budgeting to spend more than we took in. We have to get to the bottom of this.”

It’s not all bad news though, Dose has assured the elected officials and other department heads that there are some monies available from recent property sales and LATCF funds through ARPA that can help the county through the storm – but those funds are nothing more than a one-time fix and that if the problem and solution aren’t determined in 10 months, they’ll be back in the same position they are right now.

“We’re going to use one-time money from some different county property sales and some budget cutting, and then there has to be an audit to determine what the county has been doing inappropriately or incorrectly and then we have a year to figure out a solution,” Dose said. “We’re not going to do any finger-pointing, that’s not going to help. It’d be very easy to blame people who aren’t here anymore or have been overseeing the budget, but what good would that do? We need to be in the business of problem-solving, not making political plays – because we’re all in a tough spot here.”

Dose, along with his fellow commissioners Jeff Zimmerman and Tracy Casady, are adamant that cutting wages and/or personnel needs to be a last resort, but it’s not necessarily off of the table.

“Our people are invaluable,” Dose said. “Their experience and knowledge are not easily replaced.”

The BOCC will be meeting with the elected officials and other department heads throughout the week as they move toward having a legal budget ready to be adopted by next Tuesday’s deadline.