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Trumbull County officials: fewer dollars for capital improvements in 2016
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
The Trumbull County commissioners and Auditor Adrian Biviano say the spending plan they expect to write for 2016 won’t include layoffs or a tax increase as long as revenues and expenses fall in line with expectations.
The commissioners are anticipating a 2016 general-fund budget of about $44.9 million, which would be about the same as this year.
But the amount of money available for capital purchases such as police cruisers is getting smaller every year.
“We couldn’t buy [deputy] cruisers in 2015 because there isn’t much capital-expenditure money like in previous years,” Biviano said Wednesday during the first day of budget hearings.
When the commissioners first created the casino fund to hold revenue coming from the state’s casinos, the county used that money for capital improvements.
But in recent years, more and more of it has been used for day-to-day expenses, leaving less for capital improvements, Biviano said.
“There’s no money for capital improvements” unless a department has its own revenue source for them, Commissioner Frank Fuda said.
For example, the two Trumbull County Family Court judges, Pamela Rintala and Sandra Stabile Harwood, discussed several projects Wednesday that are being carried out at the court’s facilities with money from special assessment-fees paid by users of the court.
It will cost about $50,000 to replace more than half of the carpeting in the building, and certain security upgrades will cost about $20,000, the judges said.
About $250,000 will be spent to change the doors in the juvenile-detention facility to open outward instead of inward and to upgrade lighting and air conditioning, Judge Rintala said.
So far, officials have secured 60 percent of the funding for those upgrades through the state. Lobbying efforts are underway to get grant funds to pay the other 40 percent, the judges said.
They also announced that longtime Family Court Administrator Anthony Natale will retire during the first part of 2016, to be replaced by Scott Bombeck, who has been a family court magistrate for 28 years.
Judge Pamela Rintala said she’s “not happy” that the commissioners declined to increase the sales tax rate by a quarter percent earlier this year because it prevents the Family Court from starting some of the kinds of innovative programs that other counties are running.
“There are some things we would like to do, but we are so limited,” agreed Judge Stabile Harwood said, noting that the juvenile court in Mahoning County has a larger budget than the Trumbull County Family Court, which combines a juvenile court and a domestic court.