Manitowoc County’s executive is taking responsibility for the shortfall in the County Human Services budget.
On WOMT’s Be My Guest Program, Bob Ziegelbauer calls it a revenue problem, because services expenses have grown.
He says in 2020, expenses were about $22.5 million. but for the next two years, not enough was put back into the budget, so expenses grew to $33.5 million by 2023.
“It’s all legitimate expenses, and it’s a function of demand and inflation,” he explained. “But the rest of the funding comes from state and federal sources. And I was a little bit caught off guard because we had sizable surpluses in 2020 and in 2021.”
He calls the expenses justified with all the programs in the department supporting child and family services among others and you can just disband a program to fix the budget.
A way to fix the problem is either raising the property tax levy by 30% or implement a 0.5% sales tax, which Ziegelbauer says was against in the past.
“But since this problem and my cause of the problem, I won’t veto it if (the County Board of Supervisors) choose the county sales tax for 2025 forward,” he states.
It’s not known if the sales tax would take away in the future if implemented in the 2025 buget, which is why Ziegelbauer was so against it in the first place.
The county executive continues saying it was something overlooked, and he takes responsibility for what happened.
He says it was important to be transparent about the issue so it can be taken care of.
The budget deficit will be brought up at the next meeting for the Board of Supervisors tomorrow (May 21st) under Ziegelbauer’s report.
You can hear more from Ziegelbauer at SeehaferPodcast.com.
