The Dawes County Commissioners yesterday officially adopted a $12-million dollar budget for the fiscal year that begins Sunday and nearly $4.2-million dollars in property taxes to balance it. The tax rate will be just under the limit of 50-cents per hundred.
The annual public hearings for the budget and property tax request were held ahead of the commissioners’ action, but no one from the general public attended.
Commission chairman Webb Johnson says the initial budget draft had to be trimmed by a million dollars from the amount requested by department heads to keep the county under the allowable growth lid that requires a special joint public hearing.
      The result was a property tax request that’s a little more than $109,000 higher than for the current year, a boost of 2.68% because of increased valuation in the county.
The property tax request includes just under $75,000 to repay the bonds used for a road project in the Dunlap area, an expenditure Johnson will continue to shrink as the bonds are paid off.
The adopted Dawes County budget is about $4-½-million dollars more than 2 years ago and $2-½ million more than this year as the county continues to take advantage of federal COVID and post-pandemic grant programs.
The reason the general public didn’t attend the meeting was because most people didn’t get their evaluations until the day after. Someone really dropped the ball. If people had known how much the commissioners were going to bump the evaluations there probably wouldn’t have been enough room for everyone.
In a debtonomy all one can do is go in circles and stay in debt. There’s no reason to do merry-go-round system of tax and spend especially as we’ve advanced in everything but smarts and how we get money. Why should we for over 100 years be borrowing our money? And from whom and to whom do we owe? Time we wake up!