By DEBRA HAIGHT
BCR Correspondent
ST. JOSEPH, MI – Berrien County Commissioners are again hard at work going over budget information for the coming year. Commissioners have met with department heads and others over the last two weeks in anticipation of presenting the final 2026 budget proposal in coming weeks.
County Administrator Brian Dissette reported that the county board had hosted budget workshops the last two weeks of October to review the planned budgets for the county. A final presentation and budget hearing will be scheduled for later this month. The county’s fiscal year begins in January.
County Board Chairman McKinley “Mac” Elliott commented on the proposed new budget and the challenges facing the county in coming months and years at the board’s Oct. 23 meeting. He touched on a number of topics including lower revenue from property taxes and the state.
He pointed out that the court battle over the valuation of the American Electric Power Cook Nuclear Plant has been settled and will have a significant impact on the amount of tax revenue the county will be getting as AEP is the county’s largest taxpayer.
“For us to make ends meet in this budget cycle, we will have to significantly draw down our reserves and you can’t do that year after year because then there’s nothing left,” Elliott said.
He made the analogy to the water shortages experienced in the Great Plains years ago. “It’s not a perfect analogy, but years ago when there were water shortages in great plains, water was being pumped out from aquifers, which took thousands of years to accumulate and couldn’t be replenished fast enough.”
“If we draw down our reserves faster than we can replenish them, we will have a drought,” he said. “It won’t be a drought that impacts the productivity of the great plains acreage, but it will be a drought that impacts our ability to maintain our employment levels.”
He told fellow commissioners that they need to do a better job of messaging to make sure county departments understand the situation. “It’s serious, it is real,” he said. “… It’s just food for thought, it’s not going to go away. We have to address it…do it now, the more likely we can avoid across the board reduction in personnel later.”
He suggested getting ahead of future budget shortfalls by doing things such as selectively eliminating full time positions that haven’t been filled for as many as three or four years. “If we can be selective about it, we can avoid the thing none of us want to do which is layoffs,” he said.
“Planning now avoids crisis management later,” he added. “So hopefully as we go through the process, we can explain what we’re dealing with, with the change to personal property which Cook is entitled to do but just haven’t done. We have to be prepared to do that and we have other large employers in the county where we never know what will happened with the winds of change.”
Elliott also reminded fellow commissioners that the county is in the service business and can’t just simply raise prices. “As we go through this, we have to be mindful that we can’t simply raise our prices, we’re not manufacturing widgets and passing along the cost to consumers,” he said. “We’re in the service business and 70 percent plus of the budget is personnel.”
As the proposed budget currently stands, revenue for primary government funds will be $218.530 million and expenditures at $233.767 Million. The budget will be balances with the use of $15.237 million in reserves.
The leading source of revenue for the county is intergovernmental revenue from federal, state and local sources and the county is expected to see a decrease in revenue of $3.336 million.
On the expenditure side, the bulk of expenditures are in the areas of salaries and wages, benefits, road construction, professional/contractual services and capital outlays. Personnel-wise, the county is budgeting for the full time equivalent of 837.2 employees, down 5.6 employees from this year.