Bonner budget shrinks, but taxes are on the rise

SANDPOINT — Bonner County’s budget is a mixed bag.

“There’s good news and bad news. The good news is our overall budget went down $2 million, but the bad news is the amount of money we had to levy on property taxes went up to 3.41 percent,” said Cary Kelly, chairman of the Bonner County commission.

Kelly said an ongoing effort to attract and retain skilled employees by improving wages for some workers was a key factor in the tax increase.

“Most of the increase went to pay and benefits for our employees. They’ve been neglected for years and years so what we tried to do is bring them up to a comparable scale,” Kelly said.

As an example, Commissioner Mike Nielsen noted that the county’s director of Geographic Information Systems was lured away by better pay, as was his successor, which created a significant “brain drain” in that department.

“If we don’t pay well enough, somebody else will and we will lose our talent,” Nielsen said.

The rising costs of health care and litigation also factored into the increased taxes from landowners.

The county is vigorously defending a lawsuit brought by developers of SilverWing at Sandpoint, a fly-in development at Sandpoint Airport. They contend the county was not forthright about plans to relocate a runway and are trying to thwart their through-the-fence access to the airport.

Nearly a half a million dollars was spent during the current fiscal year to challenge the suit and a half a million was budgeted for the coming fiscal year.

“If we lose it, we could lose up to $26 million. We have to defend it aggressively and that is very, very expensive,” said Nielsen.

The cost of employees’ health insurance was slated to go up by as much as 38 percent over last year, although the board was able to blunt some of that impact by increasing co-pays and deductibles.

“Next year will probably be worse,” Nielsen predicted of health care costs.

Nielsen added that he may revive an effort to forbid hiring new employees who use tobacco.

Commissioners said fellow elected officials and department heads were a prime reason why the budget shrank to $55.5 million.

Commissioner Glen Bailey pored over the budget for weeks and was mindful that many landowners are still feeling the effects of the recession. There was plenty of sinew and connective tissue, but little flab, according to Bailey.

“I didn’t see a lot of fat,” he said. “I did not see anything, really, that was out of place.”