County Government Tidbits : Let’s discuss the County’s expenses.

Let’s discuss the County’s expenses. Like any public body, a good portion of our expenses is for personnel. We are not nearly as large an employer as some of the cities or towns within the County, but we have 110 employees at the Aggie School, and another 60 or so at the County itself. These include teachers, support staff, custodians, kitchen staff, and administration at the school. At the County, this includes staff at the three Registries of Deeds in Fall River, Taunton, and New Bedford, as well as the Treasurer’s Office and Commissioner’s Office, and building maintenance. We’re pretty streamlined in the Commission Office itself. We employ three people: a county administrator, a benefits coordinator, and a clerk/assistant.

Other expenses include retirement, insurance, particularly health, and other employee benefits. We are proud to say that right now, our monthly insurance payments are just about the same as they were in Fiscal Year 2017, after several years of our health insurance rates DECLINING, at a time when most health plans were costing public bodies and their employees more money.

At the school, we have the same costs for employees and their benefits, as well as the maintenance of a large number of buildings. This includes the cost of maintaining the buildings, heating, electricity, and otherwise providing all utilities to the buildings. Likewise on the County side of our budget, we have similar building maintenance, utility and other costs.

All of our budgets are managed in a way that, not only are they balanced, but generally each department returns some money, which is then allocated for the following year. We do have some reserves at both the school and the County, which are there as they say, for a “rainy day.” We have been keeping up with capital projects, notably the school building project and the ARPA funded work we are doing on our County court houses and registries. However, both the School and County outside these large-funded sources of money, have also capital projects which we were working on before the COVID money arrived, and will continue to work on once that supply of funding is expended.

So we are typical of your cities and towns as to where County expenses are spent, and we do manage to not only balance our budget but to operate in a way that there are funds available for the next year’s budget for each of our departments.

As discussed in our last Tidbit on revenue sources, a large portion of funding relies on how busy our Registries are, and hopefully with lower interest rates, we will see an increase in Registry revenue with more registry stamps and document filings.