 Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name is Adam Payne. I'm the Sheboygan County Administrative Coordinator, and today we're gonna be focusing on the county operations, finance, finance department, and budget process. My co-host and fearless leader, county board chairman, Dan Lemming, you cannot be with us today, but I do have two very important guests. The first being County Board Supervisor County Zigglebauer. Connie is the finance chair, finance committee chair, as well as Tim Finch, the finance director. Today, we're gonna, as I said, be talking a little bit about the budget process, the overall county operations, expenditures, revenue. And to begin, if Connie, you could please tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and role on the county finance committee. Okay. My name is Connie Zigglebauer. As you said, I've been a resident of Sheboygan all my life, quite a few years. I've been active in the community. I'm a chamber of commerce, various other organizations. My church. I have four children, two great grandchildren, not great grandchildren, two wonderful grandchildren. About 10 years ago, well, prior to 10 years ago, we had a very wonderful lady in my district, Charlotte Williams. She was a county board supervisor for 10 years, and she decided not to run again. And she encouraged me to run. And as most people in the county, I had complained about government, so finally decided that it was time to do something about it. And so I ran for county board. I've been on the personnel committee, resources, property, and for the last five years, I've been on the finance committee and now finance committee chair. The role of chair really is just organizational. I only have one vote just like everybody else, but just kind of getting things organized for the finance committee meetings, deciding the agendas, and things like that. Now one of the things we're going to be discussing today is the budget development. Why is it that the annual budget is probably one of the most important public policy documents developed? Well, the budget controls everything. If there's no financing, nothing happens. All the departments or all the citizens in our county need services and ask for services and expect services and deserve those services. But unless those services are funded, there's nothing that can be provided. So the budget document determines what will be funded, what services the county will provide for its citizens. So what do you see? Some of the major initiatives are challenges as we go forward with the development of the 2001 budget this year. I believe that we're able to maintain and control our costs at the administrative area. Salaries are a problem because we're bound by union contracts for certain benefits and salary increases, so that's not always real controllable. But the big things that we have going for us now are our institutions, the three health care centers, and health and human services where we're providing for the developmentally disabled, the people less fortunate than us that need special services. Those two areas account for over 50% of our budget. With the consolidation of the health care centers right now, it's very difficult for them to keep a handle on their costs. And until that consolidation is completed, I don't think we have a big hope of being able to at least hope to run in the black for a few years. What happened last year with the budget for health care centers? You were mentioning the hole there. Last year, I don't know how deep to get into this, if our health care centers had been run as a for-profit company, they would have lost four and a half million dollars. However, due to the fact that we receive funding from the federal and state government, well, it's actually from the federal through the state, we did get, I believe, Tim, 2.9 million dollars in assistance to take care of the underfunding that we had. So our health care centers lost 1.8 million dollars last year. A few years ago, we were able to maintain the costs a little bit better. But what we're seeing right now is the county is left, and I shouldn't say is left with, it's the county's obligation to provide for those people who cannot provide for themselves. We get the patients in the worst situations requiring most care, and Medicaid only pays a certain amount of money. So it's very difficult for our health care centers to operate in the black. And we're going to talk about that a little bit more often, not only the challenges with the health care centers, health and human services, some of our largest departments. My next guest, as I mentioned, is Tim Finch, our new finance director. Tim started in May, and it's certainly a pleasure to have Tim with us today. He is the second department head that I've had an opportunity to be involved with the hire process, and he hit the ground running. He's doing some real very valuable things for us. Tim, why don't you start off with telling us a little bit about yourself and your background in the finance area? Sure, great. I appreciate it. Thank you. My background is, I'm not a Sheboygan, I'm a native Sheboygan person. I guess it's Sheboyganite. I am from Kenosha. I've been here for about a year. As I've said, since May 1st, I've been the finance director, and it's a pleasure to serve in that position. Prior to that, I was the accounting manager of the health care centers. So I have a little bit of background with Sheboygan County. Before that, going back, I had 13 years as chief financial officer for a group of related health care non-profit corporations in Kenosha. So I have a good background in finance. It goes back quite a ways, and I do enjoy doing it. I live here in Sheboygan. It's a great community. I love it here. I've only been here a year, but it feels like home already. My wife, Linda, and my daughter, Ashley, love it here and have adapted much better than I ever would have hoped for. So I'm very happy to be here. You just mentioned you've been here a year, yet you started as the finance director in May. What were you doing prior to that? I was the accounting manager for the health care centers. I actually was working out of Sunny Ridge. And that was an interesting position. When you work right in one of the facilities, you see the tremendous opportunity and also the responsibility that we have to take care of the residents of our county. So I got a real close look at what we do for our residents, and it's amazing what we do for them. Connie and I obviously know why you're here, but why don't you tell our viewers why you wanted to be the director of the finance department? Well, actually, that's an interesting story. When I was interviewed for the accounting manager position at the health care centers, I was interviewed by Linda Martin, who was the past director. During the process, she asked me a lot of questions, and one she asked me was, do you see yourself at some point taking my job, or are you interested in my position? And I think what she was driving at was, do you have ambition? Do you have goals? Do you see yourself in the position I'm in? And I took an instant liking to Linda, so I felt very comfortable and saying, no, I really don't want your job. I want the finance director's job. And she informed me he had not been here that long and that probably I would have to wait quite a while. So I said that's fine, and I still was interested in Sheboygan County and took the position anyway. But that truly is, I guess, what I love to do. I love to be in a position where I can be working with many concepts, many ideas. I love learning. It's something I don't think I'll ever want to stop doing. And in a position as finance director, you learn something every single day. We have some real challenges this year with the budget process and balancing the demands for services with the finance department. What do you see as some of your primary goals or responsibilities for the year ahead? Sure. Right now, we're in the midst of our budget process. So that's one of our number one goals now is to keep the budget process going smoothly, make sure all the steps are followed, all the committees are informed of what's going on, that the administrative coordinator is aware of what's going on, keep that process going. That's a major effort really from June through November. The other big ticket item on our plate is our new computer system, the JD-Edward system, which we implemented December 1st of last year. It has been, is a tremendously powerful system with potential for providing information that we have never had before. But along with that comes some frustrations in getting it set up the way we want it and working with issues. It is a fairly new program. So there's some things that are being adjusted in the programming. So that's not where we want it yet. So that's a challenge for us to get that where it is so it can provide us the information on a very timely basis and pay off for the effort and the money that we've put into it. Well, let's start to get into the meat of our discussion today. Tim, why don't you start by touching on some of the county expenditures and revenues so our viewers begin to get a feel for the operations here and the amount of tax levy as well as our overall dollar budget in terms of running our programs. Sure. Thanks for the graphs. I'll go to those. Don't lose your mic on the way. Thanks. I think I've got it. Okay, for expenditures for Sheboygan County, this is from the 2000 budget. We've got a pie chart that shows how we break up our expenditures. We had a total for 2000 of about $122 million. In the pie chart down below here, the largest category is the human service department. That takes about 27% of our expenditures. Another large one would be the healthcare centers. That's the one in pink right here at almost 26% of our expenditures. And then you split the rest up. They split fairly evenly between general administrative costs in blue here. Justice and law enforcement in pink also over here about 12%. And then you have smaller capital projects. These would be some of our bigger ticket items. That's the white pie, part of the pie there. Bigger items, healthcare center consolidation, things like that. And public works, the highway department, et cetera, would be about 9%. So it gives you kind of an idea of that. 121 million, how it's split up. And the two biggest departments as far as expenditures would be is the health services and the healthcare centers. Then for revenues, same thing for 2,000 budgeted revenues. Again, we have a budget of about $122 million. The breakout here is by type of revenue. Where the money is actually coming from. Property taxes is a very large portion of it at 26%. It's the blue portion. Service charges in red is actually just a little bit more at 27%. This would represent charges from the healthcare centers for the three facilities that we have, comprehensive Rockingville and Sunny Ridge. Also health and human services charge for their programs. And as well, we have charges, some charges from law enforcement and register of deeds, some miscellaneous areas that we do charge for. So it's split up into quite a few areas. Interest revenue is a piece of it, a rather small piece at 2%, but we do get interest revenue on our investments that we maintain. And use a small amount of retained earnings, which would be prior profits in departments that we've held over to try to cover operations in a future year. So that's the breakout on our revenue. So $120 million budget. We have 23 departments. You've touched on some of the key areas and lumping together some of those departments. Expenditures, revenue. When you have a $120 million budget, what does that mean in terms of our tax rate and how has it changed over the years? Sure. Our tax rate over the last 10 years is this is a bar graph that shows our tax rate over the last 10 years. And this is showing from 1990 through the year 2000. And it's the rate per thousand of equalized value on a home. And we have some highs and lows here. But for instance, if we go back to 1991-1992, we were really at a high point there of $6.87 per thousand. And what that would represent would be for a homeowner with a $100,000 home with that valuation be looking at $687 for their annual tax bill for the county. Now you can see it does kind of drop off. A high point here in 1991-1992. Now it starts to drop down during the period of 94, 95, 96, 97 was a low point at $5.37 per thousand. Now it's started to come back up. And one interesting thing to note here, this is not by accident. As it comes back up in 1999-2000, you can see that it's leveled off at $6.30 per thousand. For instance, this is a conscious effort on part of the administration and the county board to prevent these peaks and valleys and the pendulum effect of where it goes up and then it comes down. And then maybe expenditures aren't used or projects aren't done, they're kind of held off on. And you get back where you have to put money back into them. To try to level things out is much better scenario. And here you can see in these last two years, 1999-2000, you have a much better handle in this situation, much smoother curve. This is better for the taxpayer and it's better for the county too to manage the resources. Thank you, Tim. It's also a credit to the county board that in the last 10 years our tax rate today is less than it was 10 years ago. Not only do we have a great deal of operational expenses when you have 23 different departments, 1350 staff where the second largest employer in the county we also have a fair amount of capital projects or infrastructure improvements. Connie, could you touch on a little bit the five-year capital plan and what you see as some of the major projects that are coming up? Well, our five-year capital plan is attempting to be a systematic way that we do capital projects for the county. Trying to keep a level amount of spending so that we don't affect the tax rate as Tim just expected. It just explained by having a very high tax rate one year, a low tax rate the next year. In addition, when we look at the five-year capital plan, when we, generally speaking, we borrow for these capital projects and it's advantageous to the county to borrow more than ten million dollars. So we try to hold our number below ten million each year. Some of the projects that we're faced with now, and I'd like to go back a little bit, the years when we held our rate I believe our lowest rate was $5.37 in 1996 or something like that. We were postponing projects that probably should have been done at that time. And now we're kind of playing catch-up on some of those projects. There's so many things that are hitting us at one time. For instance, we knew for years that we needed a fifth courtroom. That project was postponed and postponed and postponed until finally the Chief Justice threatened to take that courtroom away from us. Well, we finally did something and we put Judge Bulgert in area for him. That resulted in having to do something for the clerk of courts, and we had to build an administration building and we had to do a lot of things in the courthouse. Had those projects been done sooner, we could have maintained the tax rate in a more level way. Now we're forced with a situation of catch-up. And of course now, due to public demand, we are restructuring our health care centers. We will be closing comprehensive and having two health care centers at Rocky Noel and Sunny Ridge. This is extremely expensive. The cost is going to be, I believe, 9.5 million, I believe. That will be funding in the next two years. We will be doing that. We're just finishing up in 2001. We'll have the last leg of the 800 megahertz system. Our radio system, throughout the county. We were operating with machinery that we could no longer buy parts for. We need to rent some tower space. We need to coordinate all the first responders in the fire departments and all those emergency personnel. That project was, I believe, 7.5 million dollars. So we're just coming in the last leg of that. Over the last, for the next two years, we're putting 13 million dollars into our airport. Our airport really provides a lot of economic opportunity for the county because people are coming in using our wonderful golf courses, eating at our restaurants and doing things like that. Much of the airport money is reimbursed to us by the federal government, but we have to expend the money up front. Also, we did the detention center. We did two. Our detention center is going to be three connected buildings, three circles. Two of them are done. We will be doing another one sometime in the future. It's in the schedule to begin next year, but it looks like due to some decrease in our need for jails that we may be able to postpone that. So there's a lot of things on the drawing board that need to be done. So that's essentially our capital project. Maybe you'd like to add to that, Tim. No, you hit the big points. There are a lot of things coming up that Shboygan County wants to do. This is an aggressive county when it comes to doing a couple of things, taking care of its people and providing a good quality of life here. It is expensive, as you pointed out, to do that. I think the steps that have been taken so far in the budget processes are very encouraging. We have a lot of things on the board we want to do, but we're able to do that within the target we want to set for our borrowing saw. I'm very happy the way things have gone so far. Very good. Now that we've given a little background on our overall operations and expense, I think we should talk a little bit about the 2001 budget process. Our viewers may be surprised to know, but we really start this process six, seven months before year end. And similar to last year, as Tim touched on, we established a goal. We established targets. And there's a real unified goal amongst the county board supervisors that we want to maintain our tax levy rate to the best of our ability. We want to eliminate the high swings and make sure we maintain it at worst, have modest increases. And that's what we're seeking to do again this year. The goal, again, is to maintain it approximately at 6.30. We're looking to level that out. The targets, all departments were required to evaluate their operations capital outlay and seek a 3% savings across the board. And thus far we've met with about 10 of the 12 departments and I'm pleased to share, and I know Tim is going to touch on that as well, that thus far it's going very, very well. Why did the county board develop this goal and targets? Well, again, clearly we want to make sure that taxpayers appreciate and recognize that we are trying to maintain that levy rate. We don't want to see the kind of increases that have occurred in the past as well as we're concerned about equalized value. That's a very important component and preliminary information is that the equalized value may not be as high as it was in past years. So we're taking a very conservative approach to prepare ourselves for that. And finally, and I want to be very clear on this point, a government in general does a very good job justifying new programs. But where we need to improve is evaluating and making sure we're accountable for programs that are in place. And my job as an administrator, Tim's, and all our staff professionals is to annually evaluate these programs, establish priorities, make recommendations, and then let Connie and the other county board supervisors determine what the priorities are going to be as they are the final decision makers. So with that, in terms of the budget process, why don't you give our viewers a little bit of an overview on how that works? Sure, I'd love to. I think it's a very extensive process and we've kind of discussed a little bit, you know, looking at some of the things that we have as far as information and prior year budgets begins in June. And actually, I think it probably begins before that. I think we start thinking about the budget for the coming year well before June, probably really starting in March and April, start to think about the kind of things we're going to have to do the following year. But it begins in earnest in June. And in June, the administrative coordinator developed the targets that they want to see achieve for that coming budget year. That alone is kind of a daunting process to try to make sure that we do the best we can for the citizens and keep the taxes at the lowest rate possible too. So in June, we have, after our targets are established by the finance committee and the administrative coordinator, we go to our budget kickoff meeting which is a meeting with all department heads. Everybody gets in one room and the finance committee this year, it was a joint effort with the administrative coordinator, myself and the finance committee to share the targets with the department heads and let them know what we were establishing as our goal for the 2001 budget year. After the budget kickoff, then each department head is given the charge to go back and develop his or her own budget. With their staff, when they do that, then they go back and they go to their review meeting with the administrative coordinator and myself to make sure that they've done everything they can to meet the targets and to achieve the goals that have been set by the finance committee. Then after the base budget meeting they go to their own liaison committee with their budget that's been reviewed by the administrative coordinator and in a sense then they get the blessing of their committee for what they're proposing for their budget. From their liaison committee approval then it goes to a joint meeting between finance and the individual liaison committees and they throw the budget back on the table again, discuss them, make modifications or amendments as they feel like they need to do. Then from that point it goes to a published notice of what the proposed budget is. From there it goes to public hearings and finally the county board would adopt the final budget in November so it's a long process. I mentioned earlier 10 of 12 of the departments thus far have met the targets and that's encouraging although we haven't come up with the largest departments yet they haven't met with Tim and myself and we're really quality control. Again it's our job to make sure they meet the targets are going through the process correctly and then the madam chair of the finance committee the committee as a whole and the county board really establishes what the priorities are going to be and make the final decision. Connie in your opinion are some of the more difficult departments in terms of meeting the targets this year? Well it's interesting that you say that the departments that have come in so far have come in and have the 3% cut because the department and that's wonderful, I mean I give all these department managers a lot of credit but the departments we've met with so far or you've met with so far have the smaller budgets and are able to perhaps they don't provide services to the elderly or to the disabled people so it's a little easier perhaps for them to do that. When we begin to look at the health care centers we're going to have a problem because of the inefficiencies because of the way we're operating now once we have the two facilities I think we'll be able to handle that the other difficult very difficult areas could be health and human services how can they cut 3% of their budget when 80 to 90% of their budget is matched funds so it's going to be extremely difficult for them and people those are some people who really need the county's help so we're going to be very careful in that area to take a look at that. Recently we had just a tremendous turnout at our health and human services public hearings and we're really looking for more public input and one of the misnomers where the cuts have already been made and that frankly is not the case as certainly you both know but I want to make sure our viewers appreciate that no cuts have been made at this time every department needs to look at their department budget see where they can prioritize see where they can garner some savings and then the county board supervisors will establish the priorities as if the majority of the departments are able to achieve some savings the supervisors may in turn apply that savings to a department such as health and human services I don't know what the end result will be but we're in the midst of the process and no cuts at this time have been made County how will people get more involved with the public with the input and process of developing the budget I know you want more input from the public how do they get involved from the public first of all when people come to me and ask a question or have a complaint or a concern the first thing I'll say to them is who is your county board supervisor and many of them don't know and I'll say where do you vote they don't know that either tell them if they don't vote so I think the first thing to do is find out who your supervisor is express your wishes the other thing you can do is and you can make your feelings known to the county board floor the last thing you probably can do is run for supervisor and then really make your feelings known well very good good advice I know that there's a sincere interest not only from staff but most importantly from county board supervisors to facilitate more public input and we need to hear from people out there if we don't hear from you we don't know what level of service you're looking for well with that I'd like to thank the board supervisor Connie Zigglebauer and Tim Finch for joining me today next month you can count on my co-host and again the county board chairman Dan Lemming you returning and we're going to focus on the sheriff's department there have been a great deal of infrastructure improvements made there in the detention center the 800 megahertz project right now that is being worked on and obviously is very important for public safety and we look forward to seeing you next month so thank you for joining us