Work is being done to make sure the county’s rainy day fund is built back up and is not drained this year.
Brown County Council President Dave Redding said at the Feb. 24 meeting that the council had identified a leader or a group of people to focus on the four areas that resulted in around $1 million being withdrawn from that fund last year.
The rainy day fund is like the county’s savings account. At the beginning of last year, that fund held around $1.4 million. As of January, it sat at between $300,000 and $400,000.
Unexpected expenses with employee health insurance, the probation department, the public defenders and the county’s ambulance service contract brought that balance down below $500,000 in 2019.
Last year, the county covered $60,000 in the Brown County Public Defender Board’s budget to help pay for public defender overtime, and to cover replacement attorneys for when there was a public defender conflict.
“The public defenders are meeting in March, and they are going to give us more details on these appropriations that were made and how much of those are recoverable or reimbursed at what rate,” Redding said.
“One of the things that we talked about with the board was that the reimbursement doesn’t necessarily come back into the fund we made the appropriation.”
Redding said he had been working with people in charge of the funds, like the county’s health trust fund, to make sure everyone understands what is expected to come out of those funds, where the transfers are coming from, and what expenses could possibly be reimbursed by the state.
Redding said he had spoken with Human Resources Coordinator Melissa Stinson about other options for providing health insurance for county employees, like what Brown County Schools currently offers its employees.
“She’s out collecting data on all of the different plans for the different people working in Brown County that are material to what we’re trying to do here, to understand the pluses and minuses between other plans,” he said.
“I think the conclusion of that would be either it strengthens our confidence that we have the right plan currently offered to our employees on our Brown County government team, or they unearthed some options with some cost savings.”
After this year, Brown County government’s current health insurance contract is up.
At the Feb. 5 Brown County Commissioners meeting, Stinson said she’d be meeting with Brown County Schools Superintendent Laura Hammack and the schools’ benefits adviser, R.E. Sutton & Associates, about what the school district did. When Hammack took over as superintendent, the district went with a different insurance provider and opened its own clinic. Those changes have taken the district from a $700,000 deficit in the self-insurance fund to a $1.4 million cash balance as of last month. Because of switching insurance companies, school employees also have not seen a health insurance premium increase in two years.
“Rest assured, we’ve got a group of people who are working through this to come up with a plan of how to make sure we don’t have to empty out our rainy day fund again in 2020,” Redding said.
Commissioner Diana Biddle said at the Feb. 24 meeting that financial advisers Baker Tilly had completed the first draft of the county’s five-year financial plan for 2020.
“According to Jason (Semler, county financial consultant with Baker Tilly), with the exception of our rainy day fund, we’re not in that bad of shape,” Biddle said about the draft.
When Biddle and former Brown County Auditor Beth Mulry started the planning a few years ago, Biddle said they initially set the operating balance at 15 percent for each fund at the end of the year as a goal.
“What we can do, and what we have done before, in order to kind of right the ship with the rainy day fund, because we had a catastrophic event last year, we can go towards the end of year and look at all of those funds, see where our balances are and then we can draw off the funds that are in the general fund and some of the others down to the 15 percent and put that into rainy day,” she explained.
The exact percentage will be established by Baker Tilly, she said.
“The No. 1 issue, and kind of directive we gave this year, was to correct the rainy day fund,” Biddle said of the work with Baker Tilly.
“I think that we can do that at the end of the year. I think we should have some money. We have a couple of places where we have 40 percent cash balances at the end of year.”
Baker Tilly plans to have a budget workshop with the county council next month.
“Our levy, which is just what our percentage of our tax distribution is, but within the levy we can change the distribution,” Biddle said.
Redding said he applauded Biddle’s point. “Things are still tight in 2020 that we need to look at these cash balances,” he said.
Having the workshop next month will give council a month or two to look over the financial plan before budgets for next year are submitted this summer.
