Supervisors OK budget, tax levy

The Chickasaw County Board of Supervisors approved the county budget for fiscal year 2018-19 at the meeting Monday after a public hearing.
As part of the budget, supervisors approved slight increases to the tax levy rate.
The rural tax rate — for those who do not live in incorporated cities — will be $8.74136 per $1,000 valuation, an increase of 6.6 percent from this year’s rate of $8.20 per $1,000 valuation. The urban tax rate, meanwhile, will be $5.64136, an increase of 9.6 percent from last year’s $5.14615 per $1,000 valuation.
The total budget will be about $14.3 million for next year, up just under $1 million from $13.4 million the previous year. The increase is due mostly to capital projects, specifically a bridge project that the supervisors took bids on last week. The bridge is located on Cheyanne Avenue, north of highway 170 and south of the Hoover Greenhouse. Two sealed bids had been submitted, one for $911,614.85 from Brennan Construction out of Lansing, and one for $993,896.67 from Minnowa Construction out of Harmony, Minn. The board voted 5-0 to accept the bid from Brennan, per the recommendation of county engineer Dusten Rolando. Rolando told the board the construction would start in early June and is scheduled to take about five months.
The county expects to bring in about $6.15 million in property tax revenues in the coming fiscal year, up about $550,000 from $5.6 million last year. How those revenues are divided up among taxpayers will depend largely on assessments of home valuations.
There are no major cuts or major increases to any specific departments evident in the budget, although county conservation was trimmed by about $45,000. 
The supervisors froze their own salaries for next year, and increased the salaries of other county elected officials by a much smaller margin than what had been recommended by the Chickasaw County Compensation Board.
The supervisors’ salaries will remain the same at $28,028. The county sheriff will be paid $76,885, an increase of 5.5 percent. The county auditor will be paid $58,981, an increase of 7.3 percent. The county treasurer and county recorder will each be paid $58,973, an increase of 7.3 percent. The county attorney will be paid $101,163, an increase of 4 percent.
The proposed salaries by the compensation board represented approximately a 10 percent increase for the position of county attorney, an approximate 14 percent increase for the county sheriff, and approximately an 18 percent increase for the county auditor, recorder and treasurer. Instead, the supervisors voted to give each department 40 percent of those percentages.
County clerical staff received a modest 1.1 percent wage increase. Rolando, the engineer for both Chickasaw and Floyd Counties, will receive three percent salary increase, which was agreed upon during a joint session with both county boards in February.

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