Excise Board meets with DA; peruses books

The Custer County Excise Board met for about an hour 
Tuesday morning in executive session, conferring with District Attorney Angela Marsee and Assistant D.A. Ricky McPhearson.
Both the public and press were barred, as they always are from executive sessions.
The agenda said the executive session would be to discuss with the county’s legal counsel “threatened litigation and/or counsel’s legal opinion on budgeting statutes.” Board Chairman Harold Gleason said afterwards the Sheriff’s Department had requested a legal opinion about the Excise Board’s role in the budgeting process.
Asked how budgeting was a permissible topic for an executive session, Gleason said this one was to allow the board to discuss legal counsel’s opinion.
The full board meeting lasted approximately an hour and 45 minutes. The executive session took about an hour of that.
During the open session the board reviewed the county’s financial status through the first eight months of the current fiscal year, which ends June 30. Although Treasurer Janet Roulet said the county’s sales tax was down 17 percent this year, she also said General Fund revenues are on a track to exceed last year’s.
She said the General Fund took in a little over $3.3 million during tax year 2015-16 and through the first eight months of the current year it appears on track to bring in about $3.6 million.
However, Gleason cautioned elected officers to be conservative in their budgeting requests for the coming year. He said any budget increases for one department would have to come at the expense of another.
Both last year’s figures and this year’s showed the county operating in the black. For last year, while collecting more than $3.3 million in revenues, expenditures from the General Fund were slightly under $3.2 million. For the first eight months of this year, collections topped $2.45 million while expenditures were just over $2.1 million.
Gleason said the review of the budget was to determine the county’s situation should there be requests for additional funding in the year beginning July 1.
He said it looks like the county is meeting its budge-tary expectations.
In preparing each year’s budget, he said the board tries to keep expenditures at about 90 percent of anticipated revenues.
“It’s been our goal to stay within our income,” he said, “providing the best service we can while having something on hand for an emergency.”
The board also agreed Tuesday to ask individual officers to submit their budget requests (also called estimates of needs) for next year no later than April 24.
County Clerk Melissa Parker said that will be about two weeks earlier than normal. She said she wanted the requests to be available for Excise Board members to review at their May meeting.
Summing up, Gleason said, “I think we’re blessed. We’re not in a situation where we’re facing an inability to function for the rest of the year,” as he said a couple of counties are. “We’re not in excess, but we’re in position to handle a minimum emergency if we were to have one.”