The Montgomery County Board of Commissioners held a public hearing on the proposed 2026 budget on December 4, 2025, at 10:00 AM. The budget was initially presented on November 13, 2025, and the board is scheduled to vote on adoption on December 18, 2025. Commissioners emphasized efforts to make the budget more transparent and accessible, noted a starting deficit of approximately $55 million, and reported reducing that deficit by over $30 million through spending cuts, including eliminating some unfilled positions. The hearing featured extensive public testimony from residents, municipal officials, nonprofit leaders, and first responders, with speakers voicing support for various county programs and concerns about overall spending growth.
Yeah. So I will call to order the budget hearing for Montgomery County's twenty twenty-six proposed budget. I will ask one here. Mike from the community college, you lead us in the funding agency. Okay, so thank you everyone for being here today. The budget was presented on November 13th, and in two weeks, uh the board will consider the budget for adoption at our regular the scheduled board meeting on Thursday, December 18th at 10 AM. So today we're here from you. We'll hear from you, and you may have seen or noticed that we've been working hard to make sure this budget is more accessible and easy to understand. If you saw our budget presentation this year, it was uh quite different than prior years. So uh you can check it out on Montgomery County PA.gov slash finance to get more information. And we feel strongly this budget shouldn't just be uh you know long spreadsheet or uh something that uh general public can't understand. We wanted to make it really clear about uh the kinds of things that we're prioritizing and investing in and uh what this means for our constituents. And you'll hear a lot more information if you keep following our social media, so please do that. Montgomery County PA on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, all the things. And before we get into public uh comments today, I'll just take a moment to thank all of our county staff who've done a really fantastic job on this budget. We talked about it during the proposal last week, but Dean Dorotone, our CFO, Stephanie Tipton, uh all of our deputy COOs, Mira Bailson, uh Tiffany Thomas, and of course Lee, our COO, uh it takes a lot of work. We've got three thousand people who work for the county. You've got twenty-six department heads, thirty-six over thirty, over thirty departments, uh which requires at least 30 conversations. And that'd be nice if it was just conversation. Uh follow-ups and questions and and requests and uh sorting through the question of you know what is absolutely essential for next year, uh what's it nice to have, you know, what's an aspiration and uh we have to do all that and deal with the reality of uh our revenue streams and how they they're changing um as well. So uh with that, I'll turn it over to my colleagues for any comments. I'm good. Just thanks everybody for being here. I look forward to the the comments. Um, I I think I want to thank everyone for coming this morning. Um it's a much bigger turnout than we saw last year, so that's a good thing. Um I know that as Commissioner McKeasure mentioned this process we've been working um as far back as February on really understanding you know, the budget and looking at you know where we're gonna be as we're going into the 2026 uh time frame. Um I know that I've mentioned this before where we we at one point we were up the we had about a fifty-five million dollar budget deficit. Um a lot of reasons for that. Uh we we've talked about that as far as the increases in expenses, health care and and uh our operational expenses, cost of goods, a lot of these things, uh which we what I would call as organic um increases per year. And we would we're averaging about four percent of organic growth per year just in expenses, and that's expenses where they grow that even if we don't do anything different, anything new or add anything to the mix, that's four percent uh or uh that grows, which equates to about 24 million dollars uh in additional or new expenses. So it really put us in uh in a dilemmas as we're looking at this budget, knowing that we're up to about a 55 million dollar deficit. And over that time frame, you know, we were able to work uh to figure out how we could make the reductions and get to the point where we got to today. Um a lot of a lot of things we went through. We worked with the department heads, we worked with our uh CFO and his team. Um, and we kind of really got deep into the budget and looked extremely hard at all the the expenses, the revenue uh uh increases, or in this instance, we're we're not gonna see a large revenue growth this year, which our revenue usually is tied to uh property assessments. Um, and we're actually seeing a reduction in our assessment because a lot of a lot of businesses out there are going for property uh uh reassessments. Um so all that has a direct impact to the county. And um and so when we're looking at this, uh it's extremely hard because none of us sitting up here wants to do anything that would go back to the to the community uh to request additional funds from our community. So we worked extremely hard to get to where we got to uh and what we proposed or what we advertised uh two weeks ago. Um we still have work that we're gonna look at as we go into next year for the 2027 budget. Um, you know, we um am I happy with where we're at today? No. Um, but I know I do know that um we we worked we didn't take this very lightly. And I I want to stress that we didn't take this very lightly um because we know that when we when we increase taxes here in the county, um, I know that there's a lot of school districts are increasing taxes, a lot of municipalities are increasing taxes, and it's and it's been it's a burden to our to our people, to our communities. Um and we we're trying to do everything we can to reduce or lessen that burden as much as possible. Um so I'm really anxious to hear your comments um and answer any questions we could answer. But um I know that we were able to shave off of that $55 million deficit. We were able to shave off over $30 million uh in reduction of spending. And that includes, because people have asked me, that includes a reduction in some positions as well uh that we looked at that that were uh that were not filled at this point in time, and we looked at do we could we or should we you know remove those off the rolls and and we did that.