MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The Monongalia County Commission finalized their FY2019 budget during Wednesday’s regular meeting, coming in at $35,142,781.
Commissioner Sean Sikora projects the final budget, when accounted for FY2018 carryover, will be between 3.5 percent and 6.9 percent smaller than the previous fiscal year.
“Things were being done efficiently in this county, but really the budgets at the end of the year didn’t reflect what was occurring during the year,” he said. “We always had a lot of fluff, a lot of carryovers.”
The carryover will determine where that final percentage falls.
“It’d be about a 6.9 percent decrease from last year’s budget, and if things grow to where I’m projecting it could end up being like a 3.5 percent decrease,” Sikora said.
Although property taxes will actually be lower next year, that’s not where the decrease wound up coming from, Sikora said.
“We looked at what we took in last year and what we took in this year, and the increases were basically due to value changes,” he said. “So we decided to keep the property taxes at last year’s level, which means we lowed the levy rate by approximately one percent this year.
For Class II property, that translates to a reduction of $0.12 per $100 of assessed value to $0.1188 per $100 of assessed value; Class III property is reduced from $0.24 per $100 of assessed value to $0.2376 per $100 of assessed value; and Class IV property was reduced from $0.48 per $100 of assessed value to $0.4752 per $100 of assessed value.
“We’re being responsible with these dollars, and we’re going to hold ourselves to a certain amount that’s required to run the county,” Sikora said. “And we’re going to return what’s not needed.”
Monongalia County Commissioners also approved grant money in the budget at an increase to last year’s totals, which Sikora said was a tough process.
“This was a tough year because our increases were up by about $400,000 over what last year’s requests were,” he said. “But we still managed to fund about 74 percent of those requests, which equates to about a $379,000 increase over last year.”
Sikora also expressed excitement over the future of the West Virginia Checkbook Project, which will allow citizens to see real-time expenditures by Monongalia County Commission in an online database.
He added, “It’s just a continuing effort to try to be transparent and really try to… lead the way in regards to Mon County stepping out and being the first to actually be involved in that process.”