County Commissioners Consider Budgetary Guidance for Fiscal Year 2019 /2020 | Eastern North Carolina Now

Beaufort County's governing body does not have a majority of commissioners who wish to challenge the budgeting process.

    The Beaufort County Commissioners must deliver a budget for Fiscal Year 2019 /2020 for the county government that is their charge to govern. This ongoing exercise of fiduciary governing and management of Beaufort County's treasury will never abate, so long as each duly elected commissioner is sworn to this service, which must be considered by this governing body as the most significant issue of continued governance in each fiscal budgeting season. That budgeting season begins now. Accordingly, I brought to this Beaufort County Board of Commissioners the discussion of this governing necessity of the wisest policy to budget well, and then to maintain oversight.

    At this General Meeting of February 4, 2019, I engaged my fellow commissioners in discussion, and implored that they consider the budgeting process as in a serious manner to the extent that they be prepared to enact a Zero Based Budget rather than a Baseline Budget, which, historically, has been the preferred method of establishing a basis for the cost of governing Beaufort County by expenditure.

    This query of my fellow commissioners, save one - Commissioner Hood Richardson - encouraged them to speak out of a preferred method, which they did by asking the manager how they did it last time when they voted in a majority (6 for, 1 against) to raise taxes in the 10% range, while CPI for that relative period was less than 2%. The manager well explained the process in some detail of a process that one would construe as the Baseline Budgeting Method, where department heads request funding, then the manager makes determines relative need, and then submits his findings to the commissioners for their deliberative consideration.

    My request was centered entirely by the certainty that in the past, these Beaufort County Commissioners were not fully engaged in judging the county government' essential need of services, and to what extent our citizen taxpayers should supply those services through taxation. Therefore, the alternative to tweaking the existing previous fiscal years budget, in the Baseline Budgeting Method, should be the never used (by Beaufort County Government) Zero Based Budgeting Method, where each service provided by every department is evaluated from a point of Zero funding, and all funding from that point must be justified.

    This Zero Based Budgeting Method is currently the new budgeting budgeting process of the Beaufort County Schools, as espoused by new Superintendent Mathew Cheeseman the recent Beaufort County Board of Commissioners Retreat. The new Superintendent is seeking to gain an understanding where efficiencies can be found, rewarded and inefficiencies might be corrected.

    As a longtime county commissioner who has gone through 18 budgets, I realize that it is essential that services be provided, but at what level of these services can Beaufort County's citizen's afford?


    In the discussion of a prescribed specific budgeting method, Conservative Commissioner Hood Richardson and I discovered that there was no chance that these commissioners would give any consideration to a full Zero Based Budgeting Method, so Commissioner Richardson proffered that the commissioners consider reducing the request to a consideration of just 25% of county spending by budgeting by the Zero Based Budgeting Method.

    Commissioner Richardson moved that these Beaufort County Commissioners employ the method of 'Zero Based Budgeting for 25% of the county budget', where it failed 5 to 2, with Commissioners Richardson and Deatherage voting in the affirmative and Commissioners Booth, Langley, Evans, Waters and Brinn voting to continue the current county government's process of its version of Baseline Budgeting.

    At the recent Beaufort County Government Retreat during discussions of the preliminary budgeting process, Beaufort County Commissioner Jerry Evans remarked: "Before we (the current majority by coalition of commissioners) took over guiding Beaufort County, the government was in the Dark Ages. After the last few years, we have made a lot of progress in Beaufort County (government)."

    So far, in governing Beaufort County, the status quo remains in full force.