By Stephanie Gattman, Truth Staff
sgattman@etruth.com
The only thing that's sure about the upcoming budget process is the uncertainty.
What kind of budgets should municipalities submit without solid data from the state to back them up?
"Nobody's quite sure if we should approve a bare-bones budget or one that realistically meets our needs," Goshen Mayor Allan Kauffman said.
Local governments and schools are putting together budgets without knowing their tax levy, income tax revenues or the specific impact of the circuit breaker tax cap, so the work they are doing is based on "guesstimates."
The city doesn't want to overreact or underreact, Kauffman said. "We will submit a budget that realistically meets our needs and then probably have to cut from that."
Another big question is what role the Elkhart County Council will play as it reviews the budgets of other government entities, including libraries, cities and townships this fall.
County Council President John Letherman said the council is in the "worst management position to possibly be in."
They have the responsibility to look at the budgets, but "no authority to make anybody do anything," he said.
County Auditor David Hess said that a line-item by line-item review of each budget"will take until Christmas to do. ... All of these budgets that are coming in have had elected boards -- with the exception of libraries -- look at them and make the judgment call on the appropriateness of the spending and the percentage they are spending for certain kinds of services."
The council will not have to review budgets of elected school boards.
"So at the end of the day, if the council recommendation is nonbinding, I'm not sure that it would be well-served to spend hours and hours and hours to go through line-item by line-item," Hess said.
The council's role, then, is to offer an analysis of how all the budgets interplay with each other, the auditor said, and make recommendations based on the impact from the tax caps -- at least as much as the county will know that impact this fall.
The council is working with consultant Umbaugh and Associates to help make recommendations.
Letherman said he doesn't think the council will have to focus on general fund budgets, but rather capital budgets where larger projects are located. "My guess is that the levy limits are going to dictate the day-to-day operating expenses of all of the cities, libraries and school districts and so forth, and the real decision (is) when people want to add buildings or increase major new programs that weren't in the budget last year," he said.
The problem is, the levy limit -- a 4 percent increase for each government unit granted by the state -- is impacted by property tax caps.
Kauffman said the county government hasn't had to think like city governments. "I don't know how the state Legislature thinks this is going to work," he said. "Elkhart County is a fairly sophisticated county government compared to a lot of them."
But, "I'm not as concerned about it as long as it's nonbinding," the mayor said.
Elkhart Mayor Dick Moore and City Controller Steve Malone are concerned about what will happen when the city ships its budget to the county.
Moore and Malone don't know what changes could develop from the county's review and fear it could mean the city will have to "go back to the drawing board" before the end of September, when they believe the budget must be passed. "We will have to make adjustments pretty quickly," Malone said.
"This is very confusing," Hess said. "I'm hoping that the schools and cities and towns cut us a little slack. We're trying to respond to DLGF (Indiana Department of Local Government Finance) directives."
Hess defends the DLGF as well, saying the department is responding to the job the Legislature gave it to do. "It's tough for them, too."