Amendments to Barton County’s operating budget were approved by the county commission on Tuesday following a public hearing on the topic. This increases the budget authority on how much can be spent but does not involve new ad valorem taxes, County Administrator Matt Patzner said.
With no one from the public there to comment, the hearing lasted five minutes as Matt Patzner explained what was happening.
Amendments were requested to the General Fund, Road and Bridge Fund and Special Alcohol Fund budgets.
“The request is due to unanticipated revenue from various sources unrelated to the ad valorem tax,” Patzner said. “All of these funds have sufficient unanticipated revenue (to) request budget amendments.”
• Amending the General Fund will increase budget authority by $2,690,275. He said this will allow for a transfer of unanticipated revenue to reserve funds for future projects, if that’s deemed practical. “A big piece of the $2.6 million is the sale of tax credits earlier this year. We received those proceeds, and then we turned around immediately and transferred it into reserves. So, a lot of this budget authority was eaten up by that transfer already. This is capturing all of that.”
• Amending the Road and Bridge budget will increase budget authority by $275,600 “to cover additional purchase of aggregates and other consumable goods that are necessary for operations, as well as future road overlay projects that will be funded by Federal Fund Exchange money (from the Kansas Department of Transportation) and other anticipated revenue.”
• Amending the Special Alcohol Fund will increase budget authority by $660. In January of 2025, “we allocated funds ... and we essentially took the fund to zero, but there was more in the fund than the budget authority allowed us to spend.” This action makes the money available if anything comes up.
Commissioner Shawn Hutchinson asked Patzner to explain this in layman’s terms. The commissioners had gone over everything with him earlier, in a study session, but he wanted the public to understand. “Are we raising taxes?”
“No,” Patzner said. “One thing that I want to make very clear: Because we are amending this budget, it does not mean that we have to spend this money. Essentially, we took in more revenue than we planned on taking in through 2025. This is basically just raising the budget authority to meet what we actually took in. It gives us the option when it comes to transfer time: Do we want to make the transfer? Do we want to keep it in cash carry forward? Usually, it’s somewhere in between there.
“So, for instance, we’re probably not going to make a $2.6 million transfer from the general fund, because we’ll have to look at what we need in cash carry forward. What do we need to start the year? We’re budgeting for 2027, so that just gives us the authority to transfer it, but we’re not obligated to.”
