The Carroll County Board of Commissioners held an open session on March 17, 2026, to receive the recommended FY27 budget presentation from the Department of Management and Budget. Ted Zaleski, Director, presented an overview of the county's financial outlook, including revenue projections, expenditure plans, and key challenges. Commissioners discussed funding priorities, one-time surplus use, and long-term planning.
And we are now in session for the recommended budget. We will begin with Pledge of Allegiance and a moment of silent reflection. Indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the recommended budget presentation for FY27. Uh, just to give everybody a brief introduction here, the recommended budget that we will be uh receiving a presentation on today uh has been based on previous years, has been crafted by budget and management with some input from commissioners. This is not the final budget. I think that's incredibly important to say this is not the final budget. This is only a presentation. The final budget uh will occur in uh in May. And after today, the commissioners will begin working in earnest on the budget, uh beginning with agency hearings next week. Uh today is again just a recommended budget presentation. And so Ted, I will kick things over to you and Heidi to take us through this amazing presentation. Sure, after you stole my thunder. All right, so next step in their journey. Uh FY27 recommended budget and our plans for FY27 through 32. As always, I encourage you to not read ahead in the presentation. There's an order to this for a reason, and I want to step you through it. Uh you have a bunch of materials in front of you. Commissioner Kyler has already complained that it's too much stuff. Um but you have a recommended budget summary. You've got the recommended CIP or the capital side of things. You have a recommended budget compared to FY26 that does not include some of the pen uh benefit allocations, so that you're just saying what's happening to these budgets, not things really external to them. And then you have the same information with the benefit allocations, which is actually what the budget will look like. That said, uh our problems have not all gone away, and we'll talk more about this as we get through. And lots of things to be concerned about, but for me, still the big one is blueprint, and blueprint will come up more. But on the county side of things, the big concern is the state is projecting shortfalls in their budget exceeding three billion dollars a year. Most of that is about lack of funding for blueprint. They can solve that on their own, but will they solve it on on their own? So my concern is do they look to counties to say you need to do more than we said you did. FY 26 year end. We talked about this less than two weeks ago. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here, but just a quick refresher. As of a week and a half ago, our revenue projection will lead us to expect about 44 million dollars more than what we budgeted. This is really about all of your major revenues coming in more than we expect, which is is not common. But the big change is income tax. And as always, I remind you, you know, we get 90 percent of our income tax revenue in four big distributions. We've gotten two of those. The other two, we don't see them. We don't know anything until after you have made all of your decisions. So there is still a great deal of uncertainty here. And it's possible to say income tax will come in higher than we have suggested here, but it's also possible to say it could come in lower than what we've suggested here. You have some projected unexpended, all leading to a year-end projection right now of about $51 million. You're currently sitting on about $37 million. If we make our adjustments for the stability, uh operational stability reserve and the stabilization fund, and then take out the one percent that we always carry forward to another year, that would leave you with a projected $79 million at the end of fiscal year 26. There is no getting around. This is a big number. Uh this is not typical of what we see, and this leads to a lot of misunderstanding and to a lot of hope for things that this I would argue this money can't do. And that's people have a lot of things they'd like you to do, a lot of things they'd like you to fund. And often what we're talking about is ongoing funding.