PORT ANGELES — After weeks of budget talks and number crunching, Clallam County commissioners Tuesday set public hearings on a final draft 2016 budget that returns employees to a 40-hour workweek and uses reserve funds to balance the general fund.
Public hearings will be conducted on the proposed county budget at 10:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. Dec. 1 in Room 160 at the Clallam County Courthouse, 223 E. Fourth St.
The proposed budget was drafted by County Administrator Jim Jones and Budget Director Debi Cook at the direction of the three commissioners.
It uses $2.7 million in general fund reserves to restore a 40-hour workweek for 37½-hour employees, to add new staff and to pay for one-time expenditures in an effort to stimulate the local economy, staff told commissioners Tuesday.
General fund expenditures for day-to-day operations next year are budgeted at $36.8 million compared with $34.1 million in revenue.
The use of reserves to balance the budget leaves a “still very healthy” $9.5 million ending fund balance, Jones said in an executive summary to the draft budget.
After meeting individually with elected officials and department heads late last month and early this month, commissioners approved the combined equivalent of 12.7 full-time staffers in the assessor’s office, treasurer’s office, permit center, information technology, prosecuting attorney’s office, facilities department and Washington State University Extension.
The board also approved $145,300 to health and human services for the Woman, Infant and Children nutrition program for low-income mothers and their babies and naloxone injections for those susceptible to heroin overdose.
Although commissioners have said they would not take the allowed 1 percent increase in property tax, county officials expect new construction and an increase in total assessed valuation will add to total property tax collections, Jones said in his budget message.
Commissioners reduced sales tax for purchases in unincorporated areas by 0.2 percent this year.
That tax holiday will remain in effect next year.
The draft budget is available on the county website, www.clallam.net. Click on “Budget and Finance” and “2016 Preliminary Budget.”
Commissioners received public testimony Tuesday from Teamsters Local 589 representative Dan Taylor, who said predictions of a budget shortfall in 2014 were false.
Taylor said board Chairman Jim McEntire, who lost his bid for re-election against Mark Ozias on Nov. 3, had “been around the county and local community long enough to know the reality.”
An arbitrator ruled May 27 that Clallam County violated a collective bargaining agreement when it placed about 45 Teamsters employees on a 37½-hour workweek in January of 2014 and again in January of this year.
County officials said they would not honor the award to the union because it was illegal to pay hourly employees for time they did not work.
“After losing in arbitration the grievance over a 37½-hour workweek, the county is suing the union to get the award overturned,” Taylor said.
“This is the very reason that arbitration is in the agreement — to keep us from suing each other and driving up the cost. The board was so disingenuous and so arrogant, the union had no choice but to come after the commission. That is what we have done.”
“You, Jim, are a direct result of what a few hundred folks who were treated badly by you can do,” Taylor told McEntire, who was traveling for county business but participated in the meeting by phone.
“The union will make the cost of getting elected in Clallam County much higher, if it does nothing else.”
Taylor then turned his attention to Commissioner Bill Peach and Jones.
“Bill, make no mistake, we are watching you closely to see what you do in the future,” Taylor said.
“Jim Jones, I will remind you that it only takes two commissioners to make your at-will position belong to someone else. That, gentleman, is all there is to say.”
McEntire, Peach and Jones did not respond to Taylor’s remarks.
“I’d like to just put on the record that in the new year, we need to find a new spirit of cooperation to alleviate this back-and-forth between the union and our workers and management,” Commissioner Mike Chapman told Taylor.
“I pledge that in the new year, we’ll start a new form of dialogue of beginning to work together.
“I think in the new budget, 40 hours is guaranteed for the workers,” Chapman added, “and there’s some leftover issues that I think we have to just come together and solve those issues in the new year so that labor and management can have a predictability.”
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5072, or at rollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
