Governor Josh Shapiro is pictured during a recent visit to the IBEW Local 163 JATC Electrical Training Center in Luzerne County.

The Warren County Commissioners aren’t in a position yet where a late state budget will force the county to borrow money – but that could happen if a state budget deal isn’t reached soon.

The commissioners are calling on state lawmakers and Gov. Josh Shapiro to finish the state budget – which is now nearly two months late – before county operations are disrupted and taxpayers end up temporarily footing the bill for costs typically paid by the state. The commissioners are joining a letter from the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania.

Warren County Commissioner Tricia Durbin outlined how the state budget impasse will directly impact the

county. Those impacts range from Human Services and behavioral health funding to probation funding,

some salary funding and grant dollars.

“Anything that comes from the state is gone,” she said.”With the legislature recessed until after Labor Day, counties face growing risks to critical services for seniors and children, while our mutual constituents grow increasingly frustrated by the ongoing delay,” the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania said in a letter to the governor and General Assembly. “We are not telling you how to do your job; we are simply asking you to do your job. Our residents cannot pay for the Commonwealth’s inaction.”

In the last 25 years, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has missed at least a dozen budget deadlines, causing significant disruption. Shapiro said at the end of July billions of dollars in aid to Pennsylvania’s schools and human services will be delayed.

State-supported universities, libraries, early-childhood education programs and county health departments also will see delays in payments, Shapiro’s administration said in letters sent at the end of July to providers. Pennsylvania school districts, which received more than $11 billion last year from the state for operations, will see delays on more than $2 billion in payments through August, Shapiro’s administration said. The state’s poorest school districts might have to borrow money if aid is delayed further while the Pennsylvania School Boards Association says the stalemate is causing districts to reconsider how they spend, such as leaving teaching positions unfilled or putting off purchases of student laptops.

Last week, Shapiro told The Center Square that tough choices need to be made for the budget impasse to be resolved.

“Finding common ground is really hard in this business,” Shapiro said Aug. 21. “I will tell you that we are at the table. We’re working aggressively. My job is to bridge the differences between the House and Senate. They’ve got, you know, different views of the world – different priorities. It’s my job to find those areas where we can find some agreement. I said at the outset of this process that the one thing I was absolutely certain of with my budget proposal is that it wouldn’t look the same at the end as it did at the beginning. Because we all had to compromise. Compromise is not a bad thing. We are now at a point though where each of the leaders – Senate Republican leaders, House Democrat leaders – they’ve got to make some tough choices to close this out.”

How long it takes those tough choices to be made, and what those tough choices end up being, are what will affect local lawmakers. In the aftermath of past late budgets, some funding has been retroactively reimbursed to counties, but Durbin said that the reimbursement would only come if a specific program’s funding is included in the state budget.

Warren County Fiscal Director Bret Baillie said that the county – unlike others across the state – is not currently in a position to have to borrow funds to cover the funding gap but acknowledged that might be a possibility should the impasse continue for an extended period.

The Pennsylvania House and Senate are currently recessed, leaving counties to guess what state funding levels might look like. Durbin said that party shouldn’t matter in instances like this that “put constituents at risk of financial harm.”