By By JOHN EBY / Niles Daily Star
CASSOPOLIS - Cass County ranks with the 16 of Michigan's 83 counties not yet “fiscally stressed,” according to a state analysis.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm appointed a task force which reported that 80 percent of Michigan counties are fiscally stressed, based on whether or not they have been able to maintain a 10-percent fund balance.
Cass County, which began last fiscal year at 15 percent, should be closer to 20 percent.
Reflecting at the Cass commission's last 2005 meeting, County Administrator Terry Proctor, toted up some “successes and losses.”
Successes included the 2004 audit and the 2005-2006 budget process. The latter clicked because “we had all of our board members, elected officials, department heads, employees and many of our citizens informed about our financial situation and where we were headed in the future. Conclusions were made to start to reduce Cass County government as a result.”
Proctor also listed as successes the two board workshops, the annual intergovernmental forum, start-up of the voter-approved drug team and Family Court's drug court.
“On the loss side, unfortunately, we lost the medical support enforcement grant when the state cut that last March 1. We ended up losing two employee positions in the Friend of the Court's office, which had its effect. We lost a number of positions Oct. 1 and others were reduced a number of hours. We lost our budget for economic development, which in the past had been a board priority to assist start-up businesses to grow or to attract businesses from outside the county to come here and provide jobs,” Procter said.
One cure for Michigan's chronic cash crunch would be property tax increases, but since that is not likely, the task force “is trying to figure out the best way to finance the operations of cities, towns, villages and counties,” Proctor told Dowagiac Commissioner John Cureton. “The current Michigan system for financing them is broken. I don't have an instant solution on what the Legislature has got to do to straighten out the mess. We're doing our best to deal with the cards that are dealt to us, but we only have a few revenue sources as a county government and just about every one of them is severely restricted, so we just have to work through it the best way we can. Right now, the focus is one year at a time when we should be looking out two years or five years.”
A futurist some county officials heard recently said declining wages would be “the biggest story in Michigan for the next five years,” Proctor said. Vice Chairman Ron Francis, R-Cassopolis, added that the loss of each manufacturing job is wrenching enough, but “for every one of those jobs we lose probably 300 supporting jobs.”