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Lawrence Co. leaders seek cutbacks
By MARY GRZEBIENIAK
NEW CASTLE, Pa.
Lawrence County Commissioners are asking all department heads to cut spending by 10 percent in 2011.
Raising taxes a second year in a row is not on the table, according to Lawrence County Commissioner Steve Craig. He said after Tuesday’s meeting that “We cannot and will not raise taxes.” Commissioners raised taxes 18 percent for 2010.
He explained after that the bleak financial outlook for 2011 is due to current economic conditions as well as cutbacks in state funds, which contribute about 75 percent to the county’s budget. He said that while employee hospitalization and pension costs are increasing, revenue is flat because little new construction taking place.
Craig said that not having enough money to run county programs is “the new normal.”
In a related vein, County Controller David Gettings reported that the county pension fund recently suffered a large loss and he forecast that the next two to three months will be “very volatile” because of uncertainty in economic markets. He said that the county pension fund, which has averaged above $39 million for the past six months and briefly reached $40 million at the beginning of 2010, has now dropped to $38,295,103. He said the drop is less than this year’s average losses in the Dow Jones Industrial and the Standard and Poor indexes because the pension fund is invested in stocks and bonds with substantially less than average risk.
Also Tuesday, commissioners passed a resolution thanking Julie Ventura, a Grove City resident and Indiana University of Pennsylvania student who ran the summer food and activity program for approximately 57 children at the Gettings Center near the courthouse.
Ventura did the program for free as a student internship. Overall, the program, which had an expanded number of sites in Lawrence County this summer, drew 900 children, compared with 100 last summer.
The purpose of the program, which was sponsored by the county and the Pittsburgh Area Food Bank, was to make sure that children on the lunch program at school would not go hungry during the summer.