Proposed Sedgwick County budget boosts public safety, compensation

Sedgwick County’s proposed 2017 budget would pay for more emergency services workers in the field and in the call center to handle increases in 911 calls.

It also would boost other public safety issues, paying for new employees at the county jail, more employees at the DA’s office to handle video data from body cameras and more sexual assault kits at the Regional Forensic Science Center.

Michael Scholes unveiled his first recommended budget as county manager Wednesday.

The recommended budget for 2017 totals about $424.2 million, a 2.4 percent increase from this year. The mill levy that helps determine property taxes will stay at the 29.359 rate from 2010 that the majority of commissioners have embraced.

It was apparent the recommended budget needed to “concentrate on public safety needs,” Scholes said.

“Their requirements have grown but they have been operating on that flat budget for the past six or seven years,” he said.

The 2017 budget also needs to boost compensation for county employees to address the county’s problems with turnover, Scholes said.

“We weren’t keeping our guys up to the market,” he said.

He said he worked to avoid a repeat of the 2016 recommended budget, which made a wide range of cuts to public health, economic development, culture and recreation.

“There are no cuts to major services or major programs. Anything that we gave last year, we’re going to give this year,” Scholes said.

Emergency services

The recommended budget would provide more than $1.6 million in additional funding for the county’s emergency medical services in these ways:

▪ A second shift of EMS workers at the county’s new southeast EMS post

▪ Two more EMS positions and an ambulance to respond to increased call demand system-wide

▪ Two positions to provide critical care transport capability to relieve EMS’s workload

▪ Nine new workers for the 911 call center

▪ Updates to the 911 phone system for $276,000.

County officials said the county needed to increase funding for emergency services to offset a 29 percent increase in 911 calls since 2010.

“911 has been incurring significant amounts of overtime … in order to staff the volume of calls that they’re receiving. Even at that, they weren’t able to keep up,” said financial officer Chris Chronis.

Other public safety funding

▪ Two jail positions frozen since 2012

▪ Two more positions in the district attorney’s office to help handle the influx of data from body cameras. The office would also get an additional position for case management in child-in-need-of-care cases.

▪ Increasing the hourly rate for court-appointed lawyers on certain cases

▪ $789,000 for new radios for the fire district

▪ $2.85 million for the Law Enforcement Training Center

▪ Another position to expedite the handling of sexual assault kits at the Regional Forensic Science Center

Some programs, positions cut

Under the recommended budget, the county would make some trims:

▪ Eliminate five corrections positions by consolidating and centralizing some of its administrative staff

▪ Cut two IT positions

▪ Do routine preventive maintenance on county roads every six years instead of every five years, as is currently done on average, for a savings of about $1.8 million

▪ Shut down a program that provides immunizations for travel outside the country.

“Private providers wouldn’t stock the vaccine. So the health department filled that void,” Chronis said about the program’s origin. “This is a service that we believe now the county no longer needs to be involved in.”

“Now to be sure, we were charging for that service,” Chronis added. “And there will be a loss of revenue associated with this elimination that nearly equals the $138,000 cost reduction.”

Employee compensation

In order to boost employee compensation, the budget would fund:

▪ $2.8 million for pay adjustments to address turnover

▪ A $3.9 million pool for pay-for-performance awards

▪ $940,000 to comply with a new federal rule on overtime payments.

Scholes said addressing the county’s compensation issues was the other major concern for the budget, besides public safety. He said the process probably will continue into the next budget year.

“To make it something palatable, I didn’t do all of it this year. I went a long way to really fixing it this year, but we’ll have to come back next year and kind of do a second phase to make it fully happen,” Scholes said.

‘Choices we’re making’

Under the recommended budget, the county will have deficit spending in property tax-supported funds for the next several years. There’s a projected surplus in 2021.

Commissioner Richard Ranzau expressed concern that the county could still have deficits in 2020 and 2021 at current spending levels.

“I don’t believe that this budget improves the long-term forecast,” Ranzau said.

Commissioner Dave Unruh criticized the county’s aversion to funding capital projects with debt by issuing bonds. The current commission majority wants to pay for those projects solely with cash to limit the county’s debt.

Unruh said the county can’t reduce the property tax rate because of the shift away from debt financing.

“We’re making the choice when we could be probably more aggressive partners with some of our community partnerships that we’ve had, whether it’s health and human services or whether it’s culture and recreation,” Unruh said. “Those are some choices we’re making by not using debt financing.”

Howell said most of the budget’s personnel additions are going to critical public safety offices.

“We’re adding a lot of really necessary staff in places we’ve been short for a long time,” Howell said.

The public can comment on the recommended budget at www.sedgwickcounty.org/finance/2017budget.asp. There will also be public hearings on July 27 and Aug. 4.

The final budget will be approved Aug. 10.

This story was originally published July 13, 2016 at 10:22 AM with the headline "Proposed Sedgwick County budget boosts public safety, compensation."