Franklin County orders administrator to craft targeted spending-freeze plan, explore bulk fuel options

County Administrator Danzel said the board should instruct staff to design a targeted approach to limit year‑end overspending and improve budget forecasting, and commissioners voted to have the administrator and the auditor's office return next week with a recommended plan.

Tim Anderson, a county finance staff member presenting the proposal, described segregating high-dollar "other than personnel services" lines into separate line-item budgets so those amounts cannot be masked by underspending elsewhere. "What the ultimately, what the, proposal today is is going, with lines that are $200,000 and above," Anderson said, describing an example in Corrections where extracting roughly $2.8 million from a $3.7 million OTPS (other than personnel services) budget would leave a much smaller discretionary bucket and separate high-dollar lines for audit and control.

Anderson said segregating 16 high-dollar lines across departments (Planning, Public Defense, Facilities, Information Services, Sheriff, Corrections and others) would cover about 60% of discretionary non‑salary spending, excluding "aid to other governments" and non‑departmental accounts. He noted that some lines are already over budget and recommended transfers to prevent segregated lines from beginning the year negative.

County Administrator Danzel urged caution about blunt, low-dollar thresholds. "In exploring, the just the straight $500 spending freeze, I reached out to a lot of our contemporaries, and they said, you will like it for about 2 weeks, and then it'll be so overwhelming because almost everything nowadays costs more than $500," he said, arguing a scalpel approach would be less administratively burdensome.

Commissioners discussed logistics, including how to handle elected offices such as the sheriff's office. Commissioner Baumann asked whether curtailing spending in elected offices would require formal budget amendments; staff answered that the board retains oversight and can use transfers or resolutions to adjust budgets but that elected officials have discretion once a budget is adopted.

The board voted to: (1) instruct the county administrator to work with the auditor's office and return next week with a recommended spending-freeze/segregation plan, and (2) instruct the county administrator to report back on fueling options and procurement strategies for county fuel (bids, bulk purchases, or contracting options). Both motions carried on recorded voice votes.

Danzel also described a related management proposal to examine fleet needs and possibly pursue a vendor-run fleet program to reduce long‑term motor pool costs; he and staff said they will bring additional information to a future workshop.