By Karen Hall

Editor

At a hearing Monday evening for the public to ask questions and learn about the county's 2013-2014 budget there were no members of the public present.

Commissioner Richard Hill Jr. attributed this to the short notice given for the meeting: the advertisement only appeared in the Tribune last Friday.

The next day, County Mayor Joe Boyd Liggett disagreed with him.

"You may get one or two people (at a hearing like this)," Liggett said. "But that's rare. Normally you don't (get any people), unfortunately."

Commissioners present at the public hearing appeared to have studied all 66 pages of the budget.

Commissioner Mickey King spotted discrepancies between the department totals and the total on the summary page for expenditures.

"We've got to have it right before we even vote on it," King pointed out. (The vote is scheduled for Monday, Sept. 23, at the regular commission meeting.)

"I will go back through the expenditures," promised Budget Director Catherine Brooks. The software her department has been successfully using for several years has recently been enhanced and updated, which has apparently led to a host of new problems.

"She's still finding problems," explained budget committee chairman Barry Spivey. "It has to be the software. The software company's in there right now, working on our software. I'm not very happy with it! We need to get that straightened out before we vote on it."

Apart from these accounting problems, the county is in good shape.

"With our fund balance we should be fine," Spivey said.

When asked Tuesday if the county budget would be ready on time, Brooks confidently said, "Yes, it will. It has to be submitted to the state by Oct. 1, so we still have plenty of time.

"We're just working through it," Brooks continued. "Everything they asked, I'm working on today. The commissioners will get a new copy, and it will have the correct budget."

"We need to have it done, and done right, so the schools don't lose their funding," concluded King at the meeting.

When Brooks was asked about the amount of paper used to print, and re-print, copies of a 66-page document for 18 commissioners, she said her office made every effort to save paper: printing both sides of the page, only printing what was absolutely necessary, and recycling as much as possible.