http://youtu.be/WgqH2mvHU7Y
The Dona Ana County Commission is pushing back a vote to approve a preliminary budget after they were unable to come to a consensus during a work session yesterday.
Preliminary budgets need to be sent to the State Department of Finance and Administration by June 1st for approval, but Dona Ana County will have to send in their preliminary budget without approval from the county commission. County Commissioner Billy Garret says there is still a lot of work to be done before a budget is approved.
“We gave the manager the authority to go ahead and submit something on June 1st,” Garrett said. “That doesn’t have all of our concerns solved. And so we understand this is a work in progress, we aren’t going to hold up the process. We are also not going to approve something in a preliminary and premature way.”
Commissioner Ben Rawson says the commission hasn’t seen the full budget, and because of that he wouldn’t be able to vote for it.
“The real reason we’re not voting on the budget is there is no unison in the county commission to approve the budget,” Rawson said. “I think that would be different if we had a budget that was presented and we could talk about what needed to be changed in it, but we are not to that point yet, we haven’t even had a budget presented to us to vote on.”
One of the areas of the budget drawing concern is how the Hold Harmless GRT funds will be spent. The money is being used to fund items in the budget based on a resolution passed by the County Commission, while covering the county’s budget deficit. But, Commissioner Rawson says many believed those departments would get additional funds.
“That’s how it was sold to the voters,” Rawson said. “That this was going to be $4 million dollars additional for the sheriff’s department, and now that’s being done away with. I think that was very disingenuous of the commission to pass a resolution saying here’s how we are going to spend the money and then decide to spend it in a different way. I think that’s wrong. I think if that’s really what the goal of the commission was then a resolution should have passed that said we are going to use this money to sure up overspending that we’ve had in the past. It’s disappointing to be that that transparency wasn’t there.”
Commissioner Garret says the resolution never was meant to specify how the Hold Harmless GRT funds would be used in the budget.
“The resolution that we passed doesn’t go into the specifics about how the money actually relates to the budget,” Garret said. “And I said during the discussion before we voted on the resolution this doesn’t get into the budgeting aspect of this, I don’t think everybody understood that.”
The Commission also asked to see a plan on how to bring county employee salaries to a competitive pay level before they vote on a budget. Commissioner Garret says the preliminary budget can be changed after it’s sent to the state, and will probably be voted on some time in June.
