Mathews supervisors discussed budget priorities with new County Administrator Ramona Wilson during a budget work session Monday night in the historic courthouse.

In her initial presentation to the board, Wilson said she had prepared a budget worksheet for the $19.685 million county portion of an overall $33.648 million budget, based on last year’s adopted budget.

The guidelines she went by included maintaining revenue-neutral expenditures, having no tax increase or decrease, and funding any budget increases with recurring revenue rather than one-time funds. She said she had allowed level funding for the schools and that she still needed to evaluate employee salaries and benefits.

“These are big assumptions, since we don’t have a state budget yet,” she said, adding that fuel expenses, especially for the sheriff’s office, will likely increase, and there’s a possibility that the schools might not get all the funding that was included in the state budget (which was prepared by former Gov. Ralph Northam). She said she left $300,000 unexpended to provide a buffer if revenues from the state fall short of what had been projected.

Wilson said that, after talking with Commissioner of the Revenue Les Hall, she did not anticipate lowering the personal property tax rate, even though there has been a significant increase in the value of used vehicles that will result in a tax increase, because the increase is likely to be “a temporary blip.”

During discussion of the matter, supervisor Mike Walls disagreed. With the value of used vehicles up by around 40 percent, he said, “I would like to stay revenue neutral on used cars.”

Reducing the personal property tax rate “is going to be imperative this year,” he said. “We just need to remind the public that if it levels out, we’ll have to go back up.”

Chairman Paul Hudgins and supervisor Dave Jones both agreed with Walls’s assessment.

“With the price of fuel and the cost of groceries and inflation,” said Jones, “it’s not a question of if—we must adjust the rate until things equal out. We have an aging community on fixed incomes.”

Wilson said she and Hall had discussed a possible decrease in the tax rate from $3.70 per $100 of assessed value to $3.20.

“The main point being, whatever the number is, to try to stay revenue neutral,” said Walls.

There are a number of cost increases that Wilson said have to be taken into account in the budget, including an 8.5 percent increase in the cost of health insurance, an increase in VRS funding requirements from 8.72 percent to 9.32 percent, and the overall cost of inflation. On top of that is a projected 5 percent salary increase for employees in order to retain quality personnel and keep up with the cost of inflation. She said the increase is lower than Gloucester and Middlesex are planning to provide for their employees. Increased costs associated with the employee classification and compensation plan adopted last year haven’t been determined yet, she said. However, she said, with the deputy county administrator position vacant and no funding allocated for a proposed IT coordinator position, there is some room to implement the plan.

Other increased costs include new employees in the sheriff’s office and E-911 dispatch center and the upgrade of a position in animal control from part- to full-time.

There is an $840,000 difference between what the school system has asked the county to provide and what Wilson allowed for in her draft budget. “The school board would have to make up the difference somehow,” she said.

Pointing out that school buses are in poor condition, with seven of them over 15 years old, Wilson said she had hoped to use American Recovery Plan funding to pay for new buses, but all of the ARP money had been allocated to broadband, so she proposed taking $200,000 from the broadband funding to pay for buses.

However, in subsequent discussion, Jones emphasized the importance of broadband development. He said the county is “close to wrapping up broadband,” and that providing universal broadband will result in future budget savings for the schools. Mathews Schools Superintendent Nancy Welch agreed, saying that if the county gets a broadband backhaul and sets up a broadband authority, it could then provide broadband to the schools, resulting in savings. “Otherwise, I’m going to continue to pay exorbitant prices for internet access,” she said.

Jones said it looks as though the schools will receive additional funding from the state in the range of nearly $2.7 million. Although $1.2 million of that that would be designated specifically for facilities maintenance, he said, that leaves $1.5 million in additional funds. Even though $258,000 less is coming from the federal government, he said, “That’s not too bad.”

In terms of broadband, Jones said not having it “is hindering a lot of things. I want it done.”

Welch said that the additional state funding she had included in her budget is not at all certain, since those funds were designated by Northam and may not remain in the current governor’s budget. Jones said Gov. Glenn Youngkin had proposed to “go deep into education, and I’m going to hold him to that.”

Wilson said that the average cost of student spending across Virginia is $12,000 per student, which would equate to a $12 million school budget. In contrast, she said, the Mathews school budget is $20 million. Walls said that level funding from last year would equates to expenditures of over $19,000 per student.

Welch explained that per-pupil expenditures are not that high, but rather are just over $14,000 per student. She said the student population had decreased, and “as the student numbers go down, we end up with a larger per-pupil amount.”

The board in general expressed support for the budget requests made by the sheriff’s office and fire department, both of which contained increases. Supervisor Melissa Mason said that Sheriff Mark Barrick is frugal with his budget requests and that “there’s always a rationale for what he asks for.”
Walls reminded board members that Treasurer Wendy Stewart had asked that the board do away with half cent rates. The real estate tax rate is 64.5 cents per hundred dollars of assessed value, and she had asked the board during a previous work session to either go down to 64 cents or up to 65 cents because the half cent always results in people’s bills being a penny off. In a brief interview on Tuesday, the county administrator said that each half cent on the tax rate equates to $81,844.