It was last week that the Vermilion County Board placed their proposed $46.9 million budget for Fiscal Year 2022-2023 on display. Also last week, County Board Chairman Larry Baughn appeared with Laura Williams on 1490 WDAN’s Community Connection program; explaining the important project the Finance Committee undertook this year. And that was a series of many meetings, over many months, for the purpose of updating the salaries for every non-elected Vermilion County employee. As Baughn explained to Laura Williams, there are so many important county jobs; and you want good people doing them.
AUDIO: You know, the Circuit Clerk’s office; of course you’re dealing with people’s livelihoods there in the court system, and making sure the judges have what they need in front of them. And you’ve got the County Clerk’s office; well of course we want the birth and death records and all that good stuff to run smoothly. We want the recording of your deeds to be done smoothly; and we want to pay those people for what they’re worth, and we don’t want them to just drive to the next town over. And with these wage increases, we’ve done it. I believe the sheriff is at full staff now.
Baughn mentioned that while the first priority in the County Board’s budgeting, such as with the recent COVID relief money, is to take care of county needs; the second is to help the municipalities when the help is needed. He cited one example of Potomac needing help to put some COVID relief money to work.
AUDIO: They had a water project that they were trying to put in place, and I think their ARPA funding that they had got was somewhat around $70,000; and to make this work they needed another $90,000. And if we couldn’t help, then what they were going to have to do was raise the water rates for every resident in Potomac.
Baughn pointed out that there’s a significant percentage of elderly residents in Potomac that may not have been able to afford the increase, so he was very happy that the county could step in.
