By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter
Levy County Commissioners voted 3-2 Monday to give Sheriff Bobby McCallum a $1.2 million increase in his budget next year, but McCallum said afterward none of the new money would go to school resource deputies.
McCallum said he would return to the Levy County School Board to request school resource officer money. The school board has turned him down for additional money up to this point.
“Got to,” he said.
McCallum asked for a total sheriff’s office budget of $14,193,451 or $1,816,158 over last year’s budget. School resource deputies, a crime scene investigator and raises for employees were part of his request.
But commissioners, citing the need to stop overspending their budget every year, gave him $13,577, 299 instead, or about $616,000 less than McCallum requested following a grueling discussion.
The $1.2 million includes $509,000 of school board money that must be spent on school resource officers. Most of the school board money came from the Florida Legislature as a direct grant from safe schools legislation.
Discussion of the sheriff’s budget took many twists and turns with commissioners interpreting the numbers differently than the sheriff and both sides becoming increasingly frustrated.
“This is like quicksand,” said Commission Chairman John Meeks at one point. “The more we struggle to get out the deeper we sink.”
Ultimately it came down to whether the county commission was willing to give the sheriff the full $1,816,000 he requested. The sheriff said he needed every penny of that money. The commission gave him less
The commission’s $1.2 million offer came at a price. The county’s budget officer, Jared Blanton, who works for the clerk’s office as their financial director, said giving that much money to the sheriff’s would mean overspending the budget by $300,000. But he said it didn’t bother him that much.
“A $300,000 deficit is well within our margin of error,” he said.
Blanton said he could live with that much of a deficit in a year when property tax revenues appear to be increasing due to higher property values.
But commissioners had other budgets to fund.
LARC FUNDING
Commissioners voted to give the Levy Association of Retarded Citizens $57,412 for next year, the same as the current year.
“We went down and cut everything we could cut,” said Director Betty Walker who is gradually phasing out her position as the top administrator of the agency. She has slowed down to two working days a week due to health issues.
Walker said LARC bills the state for $6-7,000 a month for client services. LARC has 25 clients. Six are from Gilchrist County and the remainder from Levy. Six are private pay clients.
NATURE COAST BUSINESS
The Nature Coast Business Development Council headed by Dave Pieklik received an increase in its budget from the current $59,975 to $66,400. Pieklik said rising gas prices from increased travel was the biggest item that raised his budget.
Pieklik was asked if the county had inventoried existing vacant industrial sites in the count, particularly the former Brunswick Paper and Georgia Pacific sites near Chiefland. Pieklik said the sites have been inventoried but he said the scoring system used to evaluate the properties, which includes flooding potential and other factors, may not have resulted in a high score. He said those sites are on the strategic site inventory.
“When you look at the maps and there’s not just one map, you look at the floodplains, you look at zoning, you look at future land use; when you start to look at that and you start weighing factors, some of those sites might have been on the list, but didn’t score as high because of many factors,” he said.
MERIDIAN BEHAVIORAL HEALTH
received a 3 percent increase to $77,250. The organization requested $78,750.
LEVY COUNTY HEALTH DEPARTMENT
The Levy County Health Department requested the same as last year and received it – $165,000.
LEVY COUNTY PREVENTION COALITION
The coalition was given $9,350.
In the past year, the coalition wrote and acquired several more grants and contracts resulting in an additional $245,000 in outside funding.
The county commission will see a “2,526 percent” return on its investment of $9,350 investment, according to a May 30 letter to the commission from Jonathan M. Lewis, chief operating officer. He was referring to the amount of grant money his organization would secure with a small investment of $9,350 from the county.
Lewis said the organization works to benefit the youth of Levy County.
Photo by Terry Witt: Sheriff Bobby McCallum and county budget officer Jared Blanton discuss McCallum’s budget during a recess in a workshop Tuesday.
Board of County Commission Budget Meeting July 2, 2018
Posted July 2, 2018
