Sunflower County does not plan to raise taxes this coming fiscal year, but that does not mean the finances are all rosy.
At least not according to Board President and District 5 Supervisor Gloria Dickerson who presented a cash analysis she said was provided to her by the county’s auditor.
The E-T independently reviewed a copy of the same report.
Dickerson told the board that it is recommended that the county have six months of cash on-hand in the general fund, and that has diminished from 5.28 months in 2022 to 3.04 in 2023.
As of July 31, the county had $17.7 million in the bank, but Dickerson cautioned that most of that money is already allocated.
“When we say we have that much money in the bank that includes a bunch of stuff,” Dickerson said, adding that the county’s cash reserves have been on a steady decline due to overspending.
“That tells us we have done a lot of spending,” Dickerson said. “That may be okay for this year, but at some point, we are going to have to recoup that money, because if we keep spending like that, then these reserves are going to be gone, and we aren’t going to have any reserves whatsoever.”
Dickerson pointed to the road department as one of the biggest culprits for the diminished reserves.
“We have spent a lot more than we have taken in, and if you look at the roads, we have a negative amount of .97 in cash on hand. In the bridge and culvert, we have a negative amount of .13 in cash on hand. So that is saying we don’t have enough reserves to cover not even one month of those areas,” Dickerson said.
Dickerson noted that the road department’s budget could be worse if not for a one-time Federal Emergency Management Agency payment to the county.
“If you don’t have enough in the budget, all of the spending has to cease in the road department, because it is a fund of its own,” Dickerson said. A lot of times we talk about borrowing from the bridge fund. September 3, 2023, the only reserves we had in the bridge fund now is down $27,211. We don’t have any money in the bridge fund either. We can see prior to now we had lots of money in the reserves for the bridge. At one time we had $986,000 and now we are at $27,211 in the bridge fund. We may not be able to borrow from the bridge. Meaning, when the money from the bridge and road fund is gone, all activity has to cease, because you can’t use general accounting money for the bridge fund.”
Like the FEMA payout, the county will get some relief from use tax money, Dickerson said.
“We do have some use tax money which is going to save us on that. A lot of this is when we started giving raises and adding other departments. We didn’t make any arrangements to get that money from anywhere,” Dickerson said. “We gave $15 an hour, $20, $25. We added two departments, but we didn’t raise taxes or anything to make that happen, and now it’s beginning to catch up with us.”
Dickerson said that the county has to budget for salary increases, new vehicles, new departments and other unexpected expenses, banking on getting the necessary revenue to cover them.
“Those salaries are baked in, and we can’t reduce them, and we talk about cutting the budget for salaries, what we have to realize, is at some point, probably next year, not this year but next year, we are going to have to do something about raising the taxes or something to keep us operating in the road department, bridge department and general accounting because we are spending a lot more than we taking in, and that is something we needed to know before we make decisions about raises salaries and adding departments,” Dickerson said.
Board Attorney Johnny McWilliams told the board, “It looks to me if you are going to continue to do the things you’ve been doing you are going to have to raise taxes.”
Sunflower County District 2 Supervisor Riley Rice said, “I always say, if you fail to plan you plan to fail, and we have not been planning. If you add a department, we need to see how much money it will be before we do anything. People talking about raises and I keep telling the people you may not have a job if we keep giving raises and not planning, to see how much the raises may cost. Before we do anything let us plan.”
Dickerson said, “And let us look at the numbers. The numbers have gotten out of hand we never spent more than we took in until September 30, 2018 for the county. Sunflower County has always been where we spent less than we took in up until now. And now we got so much overspending, we haven’t raised taxes in eight years, prices have gone up. Salaries have gone up. I just brought that to our attention. We start talking about what we need to do and getting it out of general accounting. General accounting is already down in terms of their reserves and the bridge coverage doesn’t have enough money in there. We can’t borrow from them. If we run out of funds for this year, we don’t have any reserves anymore. We’ve been pulling from our reserves, but we don’t have any more.”
