The Warren County Commissioners approved a proposed 2025 budget following a public hearing on Jan. 28. The county projected their budget at just under $38 million, which County Clerk Denise Stotler noted was a slight decrease from the previous year. 

The budget also includes increases in valuations for the county as 2025 is a reassessment year. 

The proposed assessed valuation for real estate in the county is just over $630 million, an increase from just under $590 million the previous year. 

Personal property assessed value is also proposed to increase in 2025, albeit by a smaller margin. The proposed assessed value for personal property in 2025 is just under $170 million, a roughly $1.5 million increase from the previous year. Railroad and utilities proposed assessed value will also increase from roughly $45 million to just over $49 million bringing the total proposed assessed valuation of the county to roughly $852 million, over a $50 million increase from the previous year. 

The budget also calls for a decrease to tax rates with the increases in property values, taxing .0379 per $100 of assessed value for the general revenue fund and an additional .1491 per $100 of assessed value for the special road and bridge fund. Those rates were set at .0519 and .1761 per $100 of assessed value respectively. 

With those proposed values and tax rates the county expects to bring in just over $35 million, operating at a slight deficit in 2025. 

In the budget, the county expects to bring in just over $13.2 million in sales tax revenue this year, an increase from $11.2 million last year. $6.7 million of those funds will be distributed between its sales tax, use tax and marijuana sales tax. $3.25 million of that revenue is being allocated to the Law Enforcement Trust Fund under Proposition P which brings the total sales and use tax revenues for the fund to $6.5 million. 

The budget hearing was sparsely attended, with only the commissioners, Stotler, Sheriff Kevin Harrison, Captain Kevin Talir, County Treasurer Jeff Hoelscher and one citizen, Wanda Thomas. 

Presiding Commissioner Joe Gildehaus first made note of Stotler’s and the county staff’s hard work compiling the budget before opening the floor to questions. 

Thomas did raise some questions about the road and bridge fund, which has a projected budget of $9.3 million in the 2025 budget. 

Thomas questioned a miscellaneous line item in the road and bridge fund that accounted for $3 million worth of spending. 

“One of my pet peeves is ‘other miscellaneous.’ When it goes up to the 10% mark of a budget, you kind of wonder what’s in there,” said Thomas. 

There is an “other miscellaneous” line item under road and bridge expenditures for $3.7 million, which Gildehaus and Stotler were quick to clarify was the county’s remaining ARPA funds. 

“That’s our ARPA money. We didn’t have a column, so we had some money left over, and we put it in that column, and we are spending that money,” said Gildehaus. “It’s going to be about $4.2 to $4.3 million in road improvements that we’re doing in 2025.”

He clarified saying one of the requirements for ARPA money is it has to be kept in a separate fund so what it is spent on can be tracked and that the commission had allocated those funds in 2024. 

Any remaining ARPA funds for governing entities had to be allocated by the end of 2024 and must be spent by the end of 2026. 

“We decided to update some of our roads that we did 15 years ago to try and get up on a comfortable schedule so you can start maintaining on a general basis,” said Gildehaus. 

Gildehaus continued saying they were mostly going to focus on overlays of existing paved roads to keep up maintenance and would focus on paving new roads in the following years. 

“Our goal is to get our roads for whatever we overlay, or do new, in 2025, we want to crack seal that in 2028,” said Gildehaus. “What happened was we did roads in 2008, then we did nothing, so by taking the recommendation from these engineers, if we can crack fill that third year, our longevity is going to be anywhere from five to seven to 10 years longer.”

Thomas was confused as to why tax dollars were being allocated to overlays on existing roads and not paving more of the remaining gravel roads in the county. 

“We’re in a situation where we’ve paved roads, and there’s a bunch of them, all at one time failing that need to be overlaid,” said Gildehaus. “What we’re trying to do is catch up with that with the ARPA money, and then in the future, we can get back to paving more new roads.”

In the end the pair agreed to disagree and a motion was made to approve the proposed budget for 2025. The motion passed unanimously.