The Shelby County Board of Supervisors today (Tuesday), approved the fiscal year 2015 budget by a vote of 2 to 1. The Board heard four options from Shelby County Auditor Marsha Carter. The first option was the same tax dollars as the previous year and the tax asking was the same as 2014. The general fund reserve would be set at $1.2 million and will lower the tax rate about 41 cents. The rural funding would have $41,000 which Carter said would be plenty of money and the secondary road would see $500,000 for an ending balance.

The concern from Supervisor Kenkel was on the secondary roads as he saw the fourth option of increasing the rural base to $100,000 for secondary roads with an increase of 1 percent on Ag land and bare Ag land of 3 percent. Kenkel said “Actually that’s the one I like just because we don’t know what is going to happen on the gas tax and we are trying to do a better job on the rock roads. We got rid of buying the sand rock. We have a lot of needs for projects and I would like to see us put something in there.”

The extra $100,000 would come from rural residents in the county. Instead, Supervisor Roger Schmitz made a motion to accept option 1 with a minor change. Schmitz said “I’m going to try this; I make a motion that we put $125,000 in the special fund from the general fund and go with option one. I am talking about from the general fund to the capital projects.”

The motion was passed as Parkhurst second and both Schmitz and Parkhurst approved with Kenkel being a nay vote. The option one budget means there will be no tax increase by the supervisors. A budget public hearing will take place on Tuesday, February 4^th at 9am.

(Joel McCall/KNOD)