The Pulaski County Council may be looking to crack down on additional appropriations in 2020. That’s when the council lets a department spend a certain amount of money beyond what’s in the budget.
Speaking by phone during last week’s meeting, Council Member Ken Boswell said the council should go back to its old protocol of not approving additionals before June. “We start additionals the day after the first of January, and we have to stop that,” Boswell said. “That is not good business practice. And we need to make sure that we are putting the money into the budget that is needed to operate the offices, and if it needs more, then we need to understand whether it truly needs more, put it in. If it don’t need more, then we need to remove it.”
The county’s fiscal consultant has urged officials to return spending back to 2016 levels. But since council members decided to hold off on changes to the county’s tax structure, Pulaski County is expected to eat up more of its cash reserves in 2020.
One major source of additional appropriation requests has been the court system. Superior Court Judge Crystal Brucker Kocher told council members that while she is taking steps to solve the issues and get outside funding, it can be difficult to know how much money the court will need. “We have no way to anticipate the number of drug users, of substance abusers, of [emergency detention orders] that are going to come down the pipe to us,” she said. “It’s not as though we are some other kind of business where we have a stack of files sitting there and we just have to get through them. . . . These are real people that we are dealing with every day in the midst of an epidemic that’s recognized by the entire state that continues to get worse and worse and worse.”
Meanwhile, Circuit Court Judge Mary Welker warned that she doesn’t expect her court’s workload to go down in the near future. She said she’s still working through cases from 2016 and 2017 and actually worked on a 2012 case last week. But she hoped that next year’s switch in court software might speed up the process of signing orders.
Council members agreed to advertise several thousand dollars in additional appropriation requests for grant funding for various court programs. Those include the veterans court, Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, pretrial service program, and a planned family recovery court. Since the grants weren’t officially included in the 2019 budget, the extra step is required in order to spend the money. Judge Kocher said she’s working with the county auditor to incorporate the grant funding into the budget in the future.
