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Tax hike was only viable option

Making up $1.2 million in a budget with $15 million in revenue required the Warren County Commissioners to put every conceivable cost-savings possibility on the table.

Many just didn’t work.

“For us to look at the potentially cutting of staff,” Commissioner Cindy Morrison said, the options were “non-existent.”

She explained that one cost-savings proposal looked at reducing the hours worked by county employees to 35 weekly.

But, she added, that would amount to a pay cut and “didn’t seem like a very plausible situation for us.”

Commissioner Jeff Eggleston also identified possible personnel cuts that were proposed at the start of budget deliberations.

“The consensus was we are already running a skeleton crew,” he said, explaining that cutting staff would result in inefficient operations.

“Once you get down to a certain place, (county departments) are going to be buried in the workload they have,” he said.

He said that cuts initially proposed regarding staffing would have saved $500,000.

“We would have knocked one-fourth of the employees out of this workforce,” Eggleston said. “It would have been draconian.”

“The choice was lay people off, cut services or raise taxes,” Commissioner Ben Kafferlin said, highlighting the need for investment now to spur savings in subsequent years.

Eggleston said that the commissioners also examined “dramatic cuts to the external agencies that we fund,” such as the Warren Library or the Warren County Chamber of Business and Industry.

“By defunding them we would basically render those organizations useless,” he said, “and at the same time only put a small dent in our overall deficit.”

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