Wood County commissioners acted on a proposed tax rate and budget for 2021 on a busy Wednesday morning last week which also covered public hearings on various funds.

The new county tax rate will raise more revenue from property taxes although the actual rate is lower than last year’s. The rate was set at 55.25 cents per $100 valuation which is lower than last year’s rate of 55.50 cents. More money will be raised due to appraised values going up in the last year. The vote was unanimous.

The maintenance and operations tax rate was set at 41.05 cents and road and bridge maintenance and operations came to 14.20 cents giving the final 55.25 cents rate. 

Projected expenditures are $26.7 million with expected revenues of $23.4 million, which would reduce the county’s fund balance from $18,475,862 to $15,104,023.

The sheriff’s office will have expected expenses of $3.5 million on the law enforcement side and $2.5 million on jail operations. That includes $3 million for salaries and benefits for law enforcement and $2 million for corrections. 

County Judge Lucy Hebron said she appreciated the work done on the budget by the various departments.

“I just want to thank everybody for all their hard work,” she said. “It has been a challenge this year with Senate Bill 2. We knew it was coming and it would have certain requirements and couple that with the pandemic and the situation about the economy in general, it was a bit of a challenge. I had asked elected officials and department heads to keep costs in line this year as much as possible. Everyone did a great job of trying to do that, but there are some things that are just out of our control. We had some increased costs that were just unavoidable. The public should know that this commissioner’s court spent about two months and about 12 workshop sessions that were opened to the public where we scrutinized line by line everybody’s budget.”

There was an “across the board” raise of 2% given to all county employees included in the budget. 

Three other short public hearings were held for district clerk records archive fund and district clerk technology funds along with a hearing for county clerk records archive funds.