Slow progress as county trims budget

Wayne County Council members want to keep the 2026 general fund budget about the same as 2025’s $38.4 million. To do that, though, they still face difficult decisions, with time slipping away.

Another budget discussion during the Sept. 17 workshop clipped $49,256 from the working budget, leaving it at $44,166,070. That figure contains padding to ensure the budget advertised to the public was high enough, such as $3 million extra in council’s one-time fund used for projects and $1.7 million — 10% of payroll — for possible wage increases.

Remove all that, however, and council still must trim about $1.5 million. If they want to offer payroll increases, that figure goes up further — about $200,000 or so for every 1% raise.

The public hearing for the advertised budgets will be 8 a.m. Oct. 6, with budget adoption scheduled for the 6 p.m. Oct. 16 workshop. Council delayed its October meeting until a Monday because of an Association of Indiana Counties meeting conflict, then had to push back the monthly workshop a day to meet the state’s 10-day requirement between the public hearing and budget adoption.

The total budget for 29 funds is $72,726,260 and is advertised on the Department of Local Government Finance’s website at wwn.to/wcbudget26. Links to advertised budgets filed with the DLGF for all Wayne County taxing districts are available at wwn.to/budgets26.

The advertised general fund budget is $44,215,326, which was the starting point for the Sept. 17 discussion. The largest advertised budget among other county funds is the $6,168,257 for the highway budget, plus another $767,501 is included in the local road and street budget. The cumulative bridge fund, which pays for bridge projects, has a $4,488,007 advertised budget.

Other fund budgets that exceed a million dollars include: American Rescue Plan Act, $3,273,291; consolidated EDIT, $3,251,285; economic development, $2,204,000; cumulative capital development, $1,393,000; emergency telephone system, $1,169,292; and Health First Indiana, $1,064,875.

Max Smith, council’s president, said the state estimates that the county could lose $1.8 million in 2026 from more property taxpayers reaching the tax cap and not paying the full tax rate, something he said could cause major problems during 2026. Future legislative actions about property taxes are unknown, and the income tax structure will be completely changed after 2027. That leaves council members wary about future budgets.

Council member Barry Ritter said that eliminating vacant positions now serves the county better than being forced to eliminate filled positions in the future.

Commissioners are working to hire a plan commission department head, budgeted this year as part of a restructuring. When commissioners considered not filling that position, Jeff Plasterer, the commissioners’ president, advocated that it is important and requested more time to work through hiring the right person. Ritter requested Plasterer suggest ways to cut $150,000 from the budget in place of that position’s wages and fringe benefits. 

Most of the general-fund money cut Sept. 17 came from the clerk’s budget. Clerk Tara Pegg requested permission to post and hire a full-time small claims employee and a full-time and a part-time position in voter registration. All have recently become vacant.

Council voted to permit posting of the voter registration jobs, citing their importance during an election year, but it unanimously voted not to post the small claims job. That will leave six employees in small claims and remove $37,659 from the 2026 clerk’s budget.

Rectifying a mistake that listed a clerk’s department position twice in the budget sliced $28,909 when the duplicate line item was removed. Another $5,000 was saved when the overtime budget was tweaked from $16,000 to $11,000, and $2,688 was cut by eliminating a per diem line item.

Those cuts were partially offset by council adding $25,000 to the line item that pays the IT department’s Microsoft account. Council previously agreed to upgrade the Microsoft account from business to government and funded that increase for 2025; however, the upgrade’s additional expense is annual.

Council also discussed the county judges’ requests that their staff members’ work weeks increase from 37 1/2 hours to 40 hours. When staff members now work 40 hours during a week, the extra 2 1/2 hours is paid at their regular hourly wages, but it comes from the overtime line item.

Council will further explore how many weeks court staff now work 40 hours, how much the increased hours would add to the payroll and whether any of that expense would be offset by decreasing the courts’ overtime budgets.

This is a year when consultant Waggoner, Irwin, Scheele & Associates of Muncie analyzes the county’s wage structure. Council recently received that report but had not reviewed the information yet. Past budgets have raised wages to the midpoint of the consultants’ report and provided across-the-board raises. Until digesting the report, council delayed discussing 2026 wages and possible increases.