When Grand Traverse County Administrator Tom Menzel took office full-time in late November, he understood the county’s financial and staffing challenges. In addition to a projected $3.5 million deficit for the 2016 budget – which Menzel must balance by December 16 – the county has faced an exodus of department heads, including its human resources manager, facilities director, jail administrator and 911 director.

But the sudden resignation of longtime finance director Dean Bott – whom Menzel calls “the person (county staff) trusted most” – and mounting backlash against departmental budget cuts has caused even the administrator to concede: The county is in “a precarious situation.”

“The organization is frozen by fear of what’s going to happen next,” Menzel says. “There is no trust. I need to get the right team in place around me. Otherwise I won’t be successful.”

Menzel hopes to shore up the county’s leadership shortage with some key hires – though relief might not be immediately forthcoming. As part of the budgeting process, the administrator issued a county-wide hiring freeze last Friday on all but a handful of positions. For those spots Menzel is still looking to fill – a new finance director or a combined finance/deputy director, a HR director, and a potential communications specialist – the county has struggled to recruit viable candidates.

“A number of candidates have been frightened away because of the county’s reputation,” says Menzel. “Others didn’t have the skillsets I consider critically important for those positions.”

Menzel is simultaneously going through union negotiations, as well as putting out fires among department heads frustrated by an across-the-board 8.5 percent county budget cut, which Menzel says is necessary to balance the 2016 budget. Both the 86th Judicial District Court and Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s Office protested the cuts in sharply-worded letters to Menzel over the past week.

“We have nowhere else to cut without compromising public safety and revenues,” Judges Michael Stepka and Thomas Phillips and Court Administrator Carol Stocking wrote. “This method of cutting a budget is similar to lining ten people up and requiring each to lose 20 percent of their body weight. Some people could do it and some may die…we cannot comply with your request to cut our budget by this amount.”

Stepka, Philiips and Stocking wrote if they were forced to cut staff, they would first cut their collections specialist – whom they say processes $270,000 in collections a month – followed by probation officers.

Sheriff Tom Bensley also argued the cuts would “require unreasonable reductions in operating costs – and more importantly, personnel.” He noted the Sheriff’s Office “is a mandated service” and that the funding reduction was of a “magnitude” as to reduce services and jeopardize public safety.

Menzel says he doesn’t believe the 8.5 percent reduction will compromise any department’s ability to provide state-mandated services. “They’ll try to make the case it will,” he says. “But everybody has excuses. Nobody has solutions. Anyone is a good manager when you have lots of money, but you find out how good you really are when you’re asked to maintain the same level of service with fewer resources.”

Menzel says he is exploring options to alleviate budgetary pressures next year, which could allow departments making cuts this year to eventually restore services or personnel. Options include organizational restructuring in 2016 and extending the county’s 13-year amortization schedule for its Michigan Employees’ Retirement System (MERS) payments. Menzel has personally contacted MERS CEO Chris DeRose to ask for a minimum two-year up to a potential five-year extension, which would help spread out and reduce the county’s payments.

“If MERS will give me that, I can work my way out of this mess,” says Menzel. Bonding the liability is another option, though the administrator doesn’t “want to tack on more debt for the taxpayers” until exhausting other austerity measures.

Despite the unpopularity of his budgeting approach and the stresses of working with a reduced staff, Menzel says he is confident he is making the “tough decisions” he was hired to make – and isn’t backing down. “I’m doing something that’s never been done before,” says Menzel. “I’m not kicking these issues down the road for once.”