Supervisors go down layoff road to tackle budget shortfall
Chickasaw County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jake Hackman goes over numbers during a budget meeting with department heads on Monday.
By Bob Fenske
The Chickasaw County Board of Supervisors reached a consensus Monday to eliminate the equivalent of 4 1/2 full-time employees from its workforce in an effort to solve what continues to be a tricky 2025-26 budget.
Board members reached the agreement to lay off one employee from the Treasurer’s Office, one from the Auditor’s Office, one from the Sheriff’s Office and 1 1/2 from Public Health and Homecare Services.
The decision came during a department head meeting that took up almost two hours of the board’s weekly meeting as supervisors laid out the numbers that they were dealing with when it came to General Basic (GB), one of three tax-levying funds they control.
As of Monday, they said, they had a $363,000 shortfall when it came to having the recommended 25 percent-of-expenditures ending fund balance when the next fiscal year ends on June 30, 2026. They also said that proposed GB expenditures were $749,000 more than projected revenue.
“We all know the issue, expenditures are higher than revenue,” Board Chairman Jacob Hackman said early in the discussion on the budget. “How many more years can we use the ending fund balance to float this county forward?”
For more than an hour, though, the board made little movement on the budget, although they, along with a number of department heads, bandied about several ideas.
Conservation Board Director Chad Humpal asked board members to set their goal on cutting $363,000 from the GB budget and then continue to budget-process cutting for the 2026-27 year.
“”I’m just going to pick on myself. Let’s say there’s four of us, you’re going to tell me I have to get down to three people,” Humpal said. “That would give me a year and a half, right, to make that decision so I could say, ‘Listen, one of the four of us has to find a job.’ That gives us a year and a half for myself or one of my three guys to go find a job.”
Board members, though, didn’t believe they could wait another year without looking at reducing the number of people the county currently employs.
“We can trim the 363 and we’re still in the same boat next year,” Supervisor Travis Suckow said. “We’re just kicking it down the road.”
“I think we’re to the point where us as a board is going to have to tell them,” fellow board member Issac Carter said, “because nobody’s going to volunteer and say, ‘Yeah, I will lose somebody.’ Of course, they’re not going to do that. We’re just going to have to do it. … Otherwise, we’re going to be here another week, doing the same thing, and the next week doing the same thing and we’re going to be right up to end and not have a decision.
“... It is what it is. Nobody wants to do, no one. We don’t want to do it; none of you guys want to do it. … But it has to be done.”
AT TIMES, THE mood in the room was one of frustration.
County Attorney David Laudner expressed concern that little progress has been made on a budget solution for GB and that supervisors either didn’t present the department heads options or know how much savings would come from ideas like instituting a hiring freeze.
“So a month ago we sat here and the problem was GB,” Laudner said, “and it’s still GB. So we sharpened our pencils. What are the options? Have you guys talked about options, I mean do you have plans A through F and which ones are the best, worst options? I don’t think any of us are going like any of the options, but do you have options on the table?”
Later in the discussion, he said that part of his frustration “is we don’t know what the options are going to save us. We have three options right now but we don’t even know what they’re going to save us.”
Hackman said his ideas included some layoffs, the sale of a county building or two to save on maintenance costs and taking a hard look at the county’s home care programs.
When it comes to the number of buildings the county owns, the board chairman referenced the number of non-county offices that are located in the Heritage Center.
“I hate to say to these non-profits, ‘Go find your own buildings’ and just take care of the county departments,” Hackman said.
He also said while he understood the importance of home care services, he wasn’t sure the county could justify what he called the $428,000 “gap” between Public Health and Home Care Services’ expenditures and revenues.
Supervisor Scott Cerwinske said the difference was $35,000 during the 2014-15 budget year and will be $428,000 this year.
“The gap is just getting bigger,” Cerwinske said, “and at what point do we say we have to quit this? … We don’t know what the federal government is going to do with Medicare, Medicaid. At what point do we call it?”
Public Health Director Lisa Welter, though, asked the board to give her time to work on a way to keep home care part of her department, and Board of Health member Jeremy McGrath, too, said that cutting home care entirely would cost the county thousands of dollars in revenue.
McGrath asked about the possibility, in an effort to save jobs, of the county adopting a furlough program in which employees would have to take one week off a year, pointing out that “a lot of companies do that.”
When Suckow proposed eliminating two “nurses,” Welter said that would gut home care services.
“I can guarantee that our revenue, you can cut that in half,” Welter said. “I’m not opposed to looking at people and seeing where we can cut, but two nurses is huge to cut.”
Suckow also said that he’d favor eliminating a position in the Treasurer’s Office, another one in the Recorder’s Office and finding a way to share the county’s Environmental Health director — either with another department head or another county.
That irked Recorder Shirley Troyna, whose office has just two employees.
“You’re going to cut my one person, but you’re going to leave four in Sheila’s office,” she said, referring to the Auditor Sheila Shekleton. “Seriously, do you look at my revenue?”
CARTER THEN said he felt at least four jobs needed to be eliminated and suggested that the cuts in the courthouse come from the treasurer’s and auditor’s office, and supervisors also discussed the need for a “floater” who can cover work in all three elected officials’ offices that are located in the courthouse.
Supervisor Steve Breitbach told Sheriff Ryan Shawver that he would probably be “in the mix, too,” and board members also said that even though Engineer Roman Lensing’s budget does not come from GB — its taxpayer funds comes from Rural Services Basic (RSB) — that he was probably correct that county leaders would take a hard look at hiring replacements when workers, regardless of what department, leave the county.
In short, more than one supervisor indicated favoring a hiring freeze, one with few exceptions.
Board members also agreed to cut a part-time home care aide position and also asked Welter to layoff a full-time home care worker or take two full-timers and have them work part-time.
Supervisors agreed to meet today (Thursday) to see what the effect of the layoffs would have on the budget, and although only the wages will affect GB — benefits like health insurance, FICA and IPERS come from the General Supplemental (GS) fund — Hackman said, along with other cuts made Monday, “we should be really close.”
BOTH SUPERVISORS and those who head county departments know the budget issues aren’t going away anytime soon.
“The thing is we know we got the GB that we can only take in so much money, but Des Moines is going to want to cut that even more,” Breitbach said of state lawmakers, “so we’re probably going to have to make hard decisions now so we can operate in the future. They want to cut property taxes and that’s what we survive on.”
He asked Lensing what would happen, for example, if his Secondary Roads Department wasn’t able to fill potential vacancies because of retirements or resignations.
“It’s going to cut services,” Lensing said. “Can we operate? Yeah. Are we going to offer the same amount of services? No. I mean that’s a simple equation.”
Bretibach, later in the meeting, agreed.
“We have no choice,” Breitbach said. “We’re not going to be able to provide the services that we’ve been able to provide for the last how many years.”
And Laudner said he believes the county leaders have more to do.
“If you look at these numbers, there’s no way to continue to run the next year, two, three years, even with small raises and cutting around the edges,” he said. “You’re going to have to take on more work or people are going to have to merge positions. Period, end of story. There’s no mathematical way to do it. Sorry, that’s not what people want to hear but that’s reality.”
And the county attorney also hinted that a wage freeze might not be an answer.
“I would rather have 80 employees who are happy, moving forward in their jobs and getting increases and advancing than a 100 who are limping along just to limp along,” Laudner said. “Maybe that’s easy for me to say because I’m down to two people.”
