The Jefferson County Commission, at its Sept. 3 meeting, approved a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which includes significant changes to personnel and operating expenditures across county offices.
“Budgeting for this year was a bit tricky as the whole country is dealing with high inflation,” said Jefferson County Clerk & Recorder Ginger Kunz. “The county ultimately decided to give a 3 percent cost of living raise for employees, so all departments funded through levies were asked to try and cut 5 percent from their operating budgets.”
The total budget for the 2025 fiscal year, which began July 1, amounts to $27,975,073, which, despite cuts, reflects roughly a 4 percent increase from the previous year.
Among the cost cutting, retirements and position restructuring across county offices also resulted in a 12 percent decrease in the county’s annual health insurance payments.
The Jefferson County Justice Court will see a 54 percent reduction in personnel spending, from $146,480 in FY24 to $94,246 for the upcoming year. This is largely due to a number of employees retiring, and county officials anticipating those roles to be filled by hourly, as opposed to salaried, staff.
County legal services, however, will see an increased annual allocation for professional services of $34,000, as Jefferson County attorney Steve Haddon expects to contract additional external resources to assist his office in the coming year.
The Jefferson County Health Department will face a reduction in its core budget for hourly personnel, from $245,155 in FY24 to $198,817 this year. That cut reflects a return to normal spending for the Jefferson County Health Department, as the budget was increased last year in anticipation of new hiring that did not occur.
However, the health department is unique in that it is largely funded by annual grant receipts, and a immunization and protection grant received last year includes $62,736 to pay existing and potentially new hourly staff.
“Since the health department is so dependent on grant receipts, and those grants often have pretty stringent spending requirements, it sometimes makes sense, if possible, to use them to cover personnel expenses,” said Kunz.
The County has also increased funding for mental health services by roughly $7,000. The resulting total of $23,528 may be used to support a mental health coordinator, according to Jefferson County Commissioner Bob Mullen. A multi-county agreement is being explored by the Commission that would share a coordinator with Silverbow and Beaverhead counties, allowing each to expand local mental health resources while mitigating potential costs.
“Nothing solid is being done quite yet, it’s really just a budget item right now,” said Commissioner Mullen on the potential new mental health services coordinator role. “But this way we have the ability to act should an opportunity arise.”
The county budget also allocates significant funding to departments that often have expenditures that are difficult to predict or are not necessarily annual, such as special rural maintenance districts, which support road maintenance and other costs from taxes paid by those districts’ residents. Since these funds must only be used for specific purposes, they are represented in the budget as total dollars available, regardless if they are used that year or not
The county’s road budget is predictably volatile — and this year’s budget reflects a big reduction in the Road and Street Gas Tax account. Jefferson County made improvements to the Williams Street Bridge last year that cost about $500,000 in oil and professional services; that one-time expense has been removed from this year’s budget.
Several hundred thousand dollars of funding has also been removed from the budget for road and street maintenance, as the county anticipates the cost of labor and materials to be prohibitively expensive to conduct a large operation this year. “A lot of counties are having a hard time affording oil based road treatments,” said Mullen. “Until prices come down, it’s hard to plan for serious maintenance and repairs.”
While the county receives 46 percent of its annual revenues from property taxes, the county also receives a significant payment from the federal government as Payment in lieu of Taxes (PILT), which are federal dollars allocated to counties with large swaths of non-taxable federal lands within their borders. Jefferson County receives roughly $1.6 million of PILT dollars a year, which is dispersed across county offices, as needed, as interfund operating transfers. Though more than half of the annual budget comes from non-tax revenues, Jefferson County, as many counties across the state, may struggle to identify and capture future non-tax revenue sources.
“County budgeting is going to get pretty tough in the future. It’s getting harder and harder to find non-tax sources of revenue. Property and other taxes have already been raised in Montana to the point where people are feeling that pressure, and we really can’t expect them to support bolstering our tax revenues any further,” said Mullen.
The finalized budget also included an increase of $278,000 for the Clancy Water and Sewer District, in anticipation of new test well construction and actualized grant revenues. While the budget is, ultimately, in its final form, it will likely be amended in the coming weeks pending the finalization of school related mills in Madison County, which Jefferson County has partial participation in.
