• • Lakefield Standard

Jackson County elected officials have continued to whittle down the tax hike they will hand to local landowners, and they’ll be available to explain their choices during a special budget hearing next Thursday, Dec. 3, at 6:01 p.m. in the boardroom of the county courthouse.

“We worked hard on the budget this year,” said commissioner and budget committee member Roger Ringkob, who also directed blame to the state’s unallotment of county aid. “We were 8 percent in the hole to start with. Everybody had to give a little.”

After sending department heads through a re-visioning of priorities and multiple special work sessions on budget issues, commissioners set the preliminary tax levy at an increase of 5.77 percent in September. Since then, the increase has been reduced to 3.84 percent, board members reported Tuesday.

Among the most recent changes, the board added back in its $3,630 support of the three-county drug court program, froze raises for employees, asked employees to pick up a $35,000 increase in health insurance premiums, eliminated a $10,000 installment toward an anticipated 2011 replacement of the county’s telephone system and cut $10,000 from the board’s budget for professional services like legal counsel, negotiations, investigations, studies and more, according to coordinator Jan Fransen.

“You don’t know how hard it is to come up with dollars without cutting services. So many things are mandated by the state,” said commissioner and budget committee member Bill Tusa. “We had to pull very small items a lot of times to come up with the final number.”

And the 3.84 percent increase is still not final, either. The board will not set that in stone until sometime after next week’s public hearing but before the end of the year.

“I’m really happy the way it’s turned out,” Ringkob said.

“As a new commissioner,” Tusa added, “it’s a learning process for me and I still have a lot to learn. … And I think down the road it’s going to get even more difficult.”

There is yet hope, though, in efforts like the Association of Minnesota Counties’ Redesign Minnesota, he said, which is taking aim at making government more efficient and ending the escalation of taxing property owners.