After initially proposing a 2026 budget that would be more than a third more costly than the previous year, Waldo County commissioners have come up with a new proposal with a smaller increase.
The new proposal, released in draft form on Friday, would result in a 17% increase in the annual county budget over 2025. The commissioners’ initial 2026 budget proposal called for a 36% hike and was met with a wave of public opposition when it was released in December.
The new proposed budget total comes in just shy of $15 million, about $2.4 million less than the previous proposal. It will be discussed at the next Waldo County Budget Committee meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, January 27 at the Probate Court in Belfast.
Bob Kurek, budget committee chair, isn’t convinced that the cuts to the proposed budget go far enough. He says the county may have to take more drastic measures, like cutting its workforce in order to come up with an acceptable budget.
“On one hand, you don’t want to be the one that says, ‘Okay, we’re going to defund the police,’ he said. “But on the other hand, it’s where a lot of the expenses are – a lot of the heavy expenses.”
In the revised spending plan, a significant share of the cuts come from reductions in some employee benefits and from leaving some vacant positions unfilled. But many of the county’s employees are unionized, which means that their wage increases and benefits were agreed upon in contract negotiations between the county and the unions, and cannot be adjusted.
In Waldo County, county commissioners propose a budget, but it is up to a nine-person budget committee to approve it. When the budget committee held a packed public hearing on the proposed budget, on Dec. 12, more than 30 people spoke out against the budget hike in a public comment period that lasted for nearly three hours.
“I didn’t hear one person say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m for the budget,’” Kurek said. “I heard a lot of people say, ‘There’s no way in hell that we’re going to be able to afford that.’”
The budget committee declined to vote on the proposal. Kurek said at the time that it would not vote on a budget proposal until audits from 2022, 2023 and 2024 were complete.
Kurek later appeared to soften his stance, saying, “We told them we want the audits before we sign off, but whether we hold to that is the question.”
County commissioners have received a draft of the 2022 audit, Commissioner Kevin Kelley said last week. The 2023 audit, of particular concern since it covers a period of time in which the county had five different finance directors who used different accounting practices, has been delayed because the person handling it is out on family leave, he said.