Schuylkill County Commissioners approved a preliminary 2025 budget Wednesday morning that calls for a 3.5-mill increase in property taxes.
That means for every $1,000 in assessed value, a property owner will pay $3.50 more than they did in 2024. For example, if a property has an assessed value of $100,000, property taxes will increase $350 over this year’s bill.
The vote to approve the $221 million preliminary spending plan for 2025 was unanimous on Wednesday. Next year’s preliminary budget will be available for public inspection until Commissioners meet on Dec. 18 to approve the final budget. The County said the preliminary budget will be available online by Friday.
If approved next month, it’ll be the first County property tax increase in six years.
Reading from a prepared statement at Wednesday’s Commissioners Work Session meeting, County Administrator Gary Bender said the major tax hike proposed for 2025 was unavoidable for several reasons.
He said, “Because of state-mandated programs and the associated need to increase local financial support for those programs, the construction of a sound balanced budget remains problematic.”
In the past, Bender said, Schuylkill County government has been able to overcome budget deficits by using reserve funds and “regularly scheduled budget reviews.”
“The Finance Office utilizes a 3- to 5-year Base-Line Trend analysis for each department’s budget requests and has brought all department and agency accounts in line with the Board’s Zero-Based Budgeting strategy,” Bender said.
He added that even with that, the County’s operational costs continue to go up. And as we learned last week from Commissioners Chairman Larry Padora, there isn’t nearly enough revenue coming in to tighten the gap between revenue and expenses.
For 2025, the County is only expecting $357,000 more in revenue than in 2024. That’s created a gap of $13.5 million.
Bender provided a breakdown of the major expenses that helped widen that finance gap. The biggest drivers of it are healthcare costs, which are expected to go up by 11.8% or $2.13 million over 2024, and the increase in County money to fund 9-1-1 services, which went up 50.6% over 2024, or $1.38 million.
After Wednesday’s meeting, Padora said the County negotiated the bump in healthcare increases from 14.7% to 11.8%. That could have been a $3 million increase instead of the $2.1 the County now has to fund.
The change in 9-1-1 services funding falls at the feet of Gov. Josh Shapiro, Padora said.
Shapiro signed Act 34 into law last year and that was supposed to increase 9-1-1 funding for counties by increasing the monthly cell phone surcharge by 30 cents. However, Schuylkill County got the very short end of that stick in terms of funding and must shoulder the burden of paying for much of the expense on its own.
Other major increased spending areas include an estimated Teamsters arbitration settlement for $696,038, expenses for reassessment appeals at $451,200, and a 6.73% increase in funding for Schuylkill County Children & Youth agency at $317,275.
As The Canary has noted in previous reports on this year’s budgeting process and in years past when the Commissioners leaned on COVID relief funding to plug shortfalls in their budgets, that money is now gone and won’t be used this year to fill the gap.
In addition to raising property taxes by 3.5 mills, the County says it plans to implement cost-cutting measures. We’ve already reported on the 38 or 39 budgeted but vacant jobs that won’t be filled or budgeted for in 2025. But those may not be the only jobs that get cut from the Courthouse.
Bender said the County will consider moves like to “right-size” some operations furlough employees in “non-core areas.” Some positions may be consolidated and eliminated. More part-time employees may be brought in and some areas may be out-sourced to unburden the government from paying those expenses.
Non-essential travel for County employees will likely be stopped and a hiring freeze may be implemented to stop the bleeding.
“The structural deficit as mentioned earlier will only continue to threaten the financial position of the County and there are no other options but to initiate actions to slow the increases in costs of government services and to increase revenues,” Bender said. “The unsustainability of wage and benefits package has to be addressed if the County is to maintain long-term fiscal stability.”
Padora said Wednesday that he expects people to not be happy about the tax increase called for in the preliminary budget.
“I don’t want to pay it,” he said. “The town I live in, my garbage (collection) went up exponentially. My sewage went up. I have to pay two bills because I have two properties. Blue Mountain School District raised taxes … a lot.
“That’s why this budget is so important because I want to try to get us through as long as I possibly can,” Padora added. “This was the first budget I’m involved with and honestly, when they came to me and said we had a $22 million deficit, I was like, uhhh … what happened.”
MORE TO COME: We’ll have much more on the 2025 Schuylkill County government budget in the coming days.
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