BELLEFONTE — It’s official. Centre County has a 2023 budget.
The Centre County Board of Commissioners officially adopted the budget this week. The tentative budget was unveiled on Dec. 6 and county administrator John Franek said that there were no changes to it.
“At that time, we advertised the budget and made it available for the 20-day public review period,” Franek noted. “We have not received any questions or comments and there have been no changes to the proposed budget since it was last presented.” It will be the 13th consecutive year that county residents will not face a tax increase. The county’s millage rate of 7.84 mills remains unchanged.
The adopted budget features a total operating budget of $106.7 million and a total capital budget of $142,00 for a total budget of $106.9 million. That represents a 0.4 increase over the 2022 budget.
The 7.84 mills breaks down to 6.65 mills for general purposes and 1.19 mills for debt service, according to Corey Troutman of Susquehanna Accounting.
Despite some technical issues on Zoom, the commissioners were able to connect with Troutman, who talked about some of the details of the 2023 budget.
“Just a couple of highlights … there are no increases in real estate taxes for the 13th consecutive year,” Troutman noted. “And there were no changes from the (previous) budget.”
Commissioner Mark Higgins talked about the effort needed to avoid a tax increase.
“I want to congratulate everyone for their hard work and discipline. I know for a lot of our non-profit partners, we appreciate everything they’ve been doing, too,” Higgins said.
Commissioner Steve Dershem spoke about the challenges involved with the 2023 budget.
“We had some personnel restrictions on this. You know, we lost our finance director in the middle of this process. Everybody in this room … we have a lot to be proud of, that we got this done. It was a pretty conservative budget. I’m happy to support it. Hopefully, we make it to 14 years without a tax increase,” Dershem said.
Chair Michael Pipe indicated that there were some challenges along the way. However, in the end, the budget came together without an issue.
“We know we weren’t able to say yes to everything. There were many times when we had to make decisions … requests that came in from department heads or elected officials. Even in our own office, we had to restrain,” Pipe said.
“We needed to be very mindful about the position we were in. But we’re in a good place.”
Troutman said that putting together the budget was a “team effort.”
“The credit goes all around the room,” Troutman said.
The budget was passed unanimously.
BELLEFONTE BOROUGH
Elsewhere in Centre County, Bellefonte Borough passed its 2023 budget at a recent meeting.
The budget sits at $14.6 million and there will be no tax increase for the coming year.
The tax rate will remain at 18.265 mills. The tentative budget was presented and approved at the Dec. 5 meeting and officially adopted on Dec. 19.
Borough manager Ralph Stewart talked about the specifics of the budget.
“In 2022 we were able to come up with some reserves or money left over. We’re going to take approximately $78,000 of reserves from 2022 to put them into 2023 and balance the budget. We were able to balance the budget with no tax increase,” Stewart said.
