Jefferson County Budget Passes With Two-To-One Vote

By Gordon HopkinsJefferson County Commissioners voted two-to-one to approve the budget and property tax.The vote was held at a meeting Tuesday morning, September 23, 2025, after a public hearing in which members of the public were allowed one last opportunity to voice their opinion before commissioners voted. Commissioners Michael Dux and Mark Schoenrock voted for the budget and tax request.While the operating budget was actually 26 percent lower when compared to last year, there is still a net increase to property taxes due to increasing expenses.Schoenrock emphasized, as he has done many times in the past, the difficulty in maintaining services in the face of ever-increasing costs. “The board this year really, really struggled with this budget,” said Schoenrock. “Do we try to keep that same level of service across the board, or do we cut?” This year, commissioners chose to keep the same level of service. Schoenrock said this would likely be the last time. He warned citizens would probably be seeing services cut in the future.The lone no vote came from commissioner Danielle Schwab, who said, “I know how the math works, and I respect all the work that we put into the budget. But for me, I cannot support a levy increase without feeling we've done everything possible to stay tighten our spending first. Over the past eight months, I've raised a lot of these concerns about deeper reviews, accountability in our departments, avoiding across the board raises, rather than merit raises, and I would have liked more time to dig into this with the departments and with my fellow commissioners, and so going forward, I'd like us to start that process a lot sooner, even if we don't have all the numbers, we can look for trends, and we can look at expenses, and do that as a pre-workshop, maybe before we get into it, so we can better separate our needs from our wants. I do think our constituents are stretched terribly thin. They expect us to ask the hard questions and make sacrifices just like they are doing, and if we don't push back or trim that extra padding just becomes the new baseline for the next year, and that's how our budgets creep up, even when our revenues are staying flat. And so, this isn't about our people, our county employees or one particular department. It's about, for me, being responsible with taxpayer dollars, and I think we could have done better. And so, for that reason, I'm going to vote no today.” According to County Clerk Kristine Riggle, “My understanding, per the state auditor's office, is if no budget is adopted, then there should be no 2025 levy set for the county and the county would be limited to spending money only as allowed under §23-914.”As noted above, the proposed budget was less than the prior year. Had the other commissioners followed Schwab’s example and the budget failed to pass, the levy would be lower but the budget would be higher.When asked after the meeting what she would like to see done differently and what she would like to see cut, Schwab responded via email, “My full statement from today’s meeting explains my ‘no’ vote and what I’d like to see done differently.”

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