County Commission Talks Budget Priorities, “Underspending”

Struggles to fill staff positions in Grand Traverse County government – with about 50 positions currently open – have resulted in millions of dollars in underspending annually, with the county budgeting for but not paying out those dozens of salary and benefit packages. That reality prompted an extensive discussion among county commissioners Wednesday on how best to allocate funds, including to capital improvement projects and pension debt payments – though County Administrator Nate Alger cautioned a conservative approach was needed, especially since jobs could still be filled going forward.

County administrators gave commissioners a broad overview Wednesday of some of the key issues likely to impact the upcoming 2025 budget. Alger said five major categories shape the county’s budget, which last year commissioners set at $47.8 million. Those include personnel, vehicles, facility items, capital expenses, and IT upgrades. “These are the major requests that drive the lion’s share of our budget each and every year,” Alger said.

Staff are still costing out several new positions requested by various departments for 2025, including a crime analyst and jail discharge planning officer for the Grand Traverse Sheriff’s Office and a treatment court coordinator/probation supervisor and community outreach coordinator for the District Court. Alger estimated each position would likely be at least in the $70,000-$80,000 range. Captain Chris Clark said the crime analyst would use crime-mapping and open-source intelligence, record management systems, and the department’s license plate-reading cameras to identify “crime trends and patterns” across Grand Traverse County, as well as “provide support to detectives in locating essential information for investigations.”

Commissioners will hear directly from department heads at a future meeting with their pitches for adding the new positions. Alger said he personally didn’t support some of the positions, like the jail discharge planning officer, since the jail is already struggling to fill several open roles. Commissioners will have the final say on creating new positions but said department heads should expect scrutiny of the requests. “We’re creating positions that are going to have legacy costs,” pointed out Commissioner TJ Andrews. Andrews was particularly wary of adding more positions at the Sheriff’s Office, “as the sheriff’s budget has grown excessively relative to everybody else’s budget in this entire county.”

Struggles to fill open positions are not unique to the Sheriff’s Office, however. While the county budget reflects having a full staff, the county has been “challenged” to actually fill all those roles, said County Finance Director Dean Bott. With personnel costs making up approximately 80-85 percent of the general fund budget, those positions – with their related salary, benefit, and retirement costs – can quickly accrue into significant budget savings if they go unfilled, Bott said.

That puts Grand Traverse County in the position, Alger said, of needing to budget as if those positions are full (because they could in fact be filled at any time) while continuing to underspend by millions of dollars annually. “We have to have a balanced budget; it’s the law,” Alger said. He said there was “no real way to deal with that” other than to eliminate positions, which are difficult to add back later. Andrews, however, believed that “underspending so substantially creates opportunity,” whether in reallocating funds to capital improvement projects or even looking at cutting taxes. “You heard it from a Democrat,” she joked.

Alger said he would dig into the county’s fund balance in more detail at the board’s September 4 meeting. Grand Traverse County has a current fund balance of almost 45 percent, or $21.51 million. County policy states that after 30 percent, excess funds will be split between the county's budget stabilization fund, pension stabilization fund, and capital improvement fund. However, the budget stabilization fund has already hit its $1.25 million cap, so the excess $7.1 million the county has in its fund balance now will be split between the capital improvement fund and pension stabilization fund, with both set to receive over $3.5 million.

A range of requested capital improvements for 2025 were shared Wednesday with commissioners, including significant repairs at the Civic Center (replacing the irrigation and driveway, resurfacing the skate park and amphitheater, replacing the handicap doors) to Governmental Center and courthouse updates to countywide parks signage to updated bathrooms at Medalie Park. Improvements to the Youth Health & Wellness Center at North Ed and upgraded TASER weapons for the Sheriff’s Office were also on the list, though the first request could be supported by grant funding and the latter could be phased in over several years.

Commissioners discussed some of their own desired projects Wednesday, including having a comprehensive assessment for where security cameras are needed across the county and a long-term maintenance plan that identifies when capital improvements (like HVAC systems and roofs) have been installed, their estimated lifespans, and when they’ll need repairs or replacement. Andrews said the county is “shooting darts” at addressing infrastructure since it lacks such a strategic approach. “We just don’t know if we’re making progress,” she said. “We don’t know what’s coming at us. We’re making massive facilities investment decisions without having a long-term knowledge of what’s coming.”

Interim Facilities Director John Chase agreed the county currently chases “a lot of broken stuff” as opposed to proactively planning for maintenance. While a recently completed facilities master plan contains maintenance assessments of individual facilities, Andrews said that data was buried across hundreds of pages in the report and not presented in a user-friendly way. Alger said he would work on finding a firm that could help the county create a more detailed maintenance plan.

Chair Rob Hentschel said the budget discussion shows that “success can be as challenging as the challenging times themselves.” He said there was “very good business sense in the county government right now,” adding that the question facing commissioners is: “Are we spending aggressively enough to match the success?” Alger acknowledged that staff are gun-shy given the dire financial straits Grand Traverse County was in just several years ago. “That memory is fresh in our mind,” he said. “We’re very conservative when we approach the budget. But we recognize there are things that we can do (to spend funds). That’s the priority of this board. This board has the obligation to say, ‘We want to do these things. Let’s go do them.’”