Centre County Budget Plans No Tax Increase for 13th Consecutive Year

Centre County Commissioners on Tuesday adopted a tentative 2023 budget that includes no real estate tax increase for the 13th consecutive year.

The $106,869,156 total budget, including a $142,431 capital budget, will be open for a 20-day public review period online and at the Willowbank Building (420 Holmes Street, Bellefonte) before a final vote occurs at the board’s Dec. 27 meeting. With no tax increase, the county millage rate would remain at 7.84 mills.

“This was a tough budget this year,” Commissioner Steve Dershem said. “We had some personnel changes that made this incredibly difficult, at best. To pull this off I think we all had to pull together and make some tough decisions, and I think we’re going to reap the benefit of those as we go into the new year.”

Commissioner Mark Higgins said the budget with no tax increase is the result of commissioners “saying no very often…, county staff doing great work and our many partners keeping their costs down.”

Expenses total $106,726,725, a 0.4% increase from 2022, with a matching amount of revenues, a 0.3% increase, Corey Troutman, of Susquehanna Accounting and Consulting Solutions, said during an overview presented at the board meeting.

The largest increase on the expenditures side is an 8.7% bump in employee salary and benefits resulting from the completion of salary and compensation study in 2022 and anticipated step and scale adjustments in 2023. Salary and benefits total $42.3 million in the tentative budget.

“…[M]oving past the salary study, which really was the big bump in expenses in this budget, I think we are moving toward a much more fair and equitable workplace,” Dershem said. “We’re now hiring and maintaining people at a fair level. I know this has been a conversation for several decades. Getting that done this year although it was again that was a tough process as well and it layers into the budget, but ultimately i think we’re going to have a better product serving the citizens of Centre County.”

Increases in salaries and benefits, as well as debt service and depreciation are offset by decreases in contracted services and unrestricted grants, Troutman said.

On the revenue side, federal and state grants and payments in lieu of taxes, which are the county’s largest source of income at 53% of the budget, see an expected decrease of approximately $4 million for 2023, but that it is balanced out by increases in departmental earnings and internal charges for services, Troutman said.

He added that the budget includes use of some American Rescue Plan Act funds to maintain current funding levels for county services. The budget maintains a general fund reserve at 12.06%, which Higgins said equals several months of operations and is at the high end for a county.

Higgins said the last three years the county forecasted budget deficits of about $2 million but that once the books were closed at the end of the year it had a small surplus.

“In Centre County we budget conservatively,” Higgins said. “If a department hopes to receive a grant but they’re not entirely sure, that grant is not in our budget. We budget every single funded position as being filled for the entire year, but obviously that doesn’t happen, so throughout the year our administrators and department heads work hard to reduce their budgeted expenditures and in many cases they are successful.”

Board Chair Michael Pipe agreed with his fellow commissioners that the county made some tough choices and put off some projects.

“We really did sit down and hash through many of the budgets sometimes twice sometimes three times to find efficiencies but also to recognize there were certain investments that we needed to make,” Pipe said. “To go to Commissioner Higgins’ point, there were many times we had to unfortunately say ‘We can do it right now, but let’s look again next year, let’s look July 1.’ We had to delay some things we’d like to do but financially we couldn’t at this time.”

Proposed 2023 Centre County Budget