The Kane County Board approved on Tuesday a $416.6 million county budget for 2025.
The budget includes a roughly $2 million increase to its general fund property tax levy, in addition to an increase to account for new construction, and the use of roughly $27 million in general fund reserves. It is the first time since 2013 that the Kane County Board has increased the general fund property tax levy except to account for new construction, according to past reporting.
Board members voted 13-11 in favor of the general fund property tax levy increase. A smaller number of board members also voted against other property tax levies, which included taxes for roads, bridges and insurance funds, among other things.
Some board members previously argued at committee meetings that the tax levy increase was necessary to keep pace with inflation and continue to provide county services. Others argued that it was the wrong time to pass such an increase because of the county sales tax referendum question set to go before voters in April.
The 2025 budget has been on display as a draft version since September, but when it came up for final approval in October, Kane County Board members voted it down because some had unanswered questions about the budget and its numbers.
It came back to the Kane County Board at Tuesday’s meeting and was approved by board members in a 13-10 vote. Board member Deborah Allan abstained from voting.
The deadline to approve the budget was Dec. 1, which is the first day of the county’s new fiscal year.
The $416.6 million budget for 2025 is broken largely into two sections, the general fund and the various special funds, which represent dollars that are restricted to certain uses.
The 2025 general fund budget totals $138.9 million, a roughly $14.5 million increase over the 2024 general fund budget.
County staff previously said that roughly 50% of the general fund is going to pay for public safety, with 27% going toward general government functions and 21% going toward judiciary functions.
The Kane County Sheriff’s Office makes up 36% of the 2025 general fund budget, which is the largest of any department or office, according to past reporting.
The county’s special funds make up $277.8 million of the 2025 budget, which is a $30.3 million decrease from the 2024 budget.
The 2025 budget is not the first time in recent years that the county has used reserves to balance the budget. Since 2023, the county has used millions of dollars in general fund reserves each year.
Kane County Finance Director Kathleen Hopkinson said at last week’s Kane County Board Finance and Budget Committee meeting that the budget was skewed from 2020 to 2022 because of federal pandemic-era relief funds, which the county used a portion of to pay for employee salaries.
If the county had not received that money, it would have also had to use millions in reserve funds to balance those years’ budgets too, she said. Instead, the county increased its reserves during that time because it used federal relief funds.
Now, the county is on pace to dip into its required 90-day general fund reserves if a new source of revenue is not found or significant cuts are not made by 2027, Hopkinson previously said.
Board members have said during multiple meetings that the county would need to cut between 100 and 150 employees to balance the budget without using reserve funds, unless a new source of revenue is found.
The Kane County Board, along with a number of its committees, have spent the past several months discussing ways to balance the budget. A number of last-minute suggestions were also made at Tuesday’s meeting, and although many board members appeared in favor of them, none reached the support required to be formally adopted.
One such suggestion was made by board member Michael Linder and would have cut the funding for all vacant positions, essentially creating a hiring freeze, which would have lowered the budget and use of reserve funds by around $5 million.
Board members in favor of the change said they would rather stop hiring new people than to have to lay off people next year if the county is not able to find a new source of revenue. Others had questions about which positions would be cut and if the board had the authority to cut vacant positions from the offices of elected officials.
That proposal was discussed at length, but it was withdrawn before a vote was taken.
Another suggestion was made by board member Mohammad Iqbal and would have cut spending until it was equal to the amount the county expects to receive from taxes and other revenue sources. This would have made the budget balanced without the need to use reserves from the general fund, but it was voted down.
“With due respect to the Budget Committee, what they have done is rubber stamp. Whatever numbers came from the departments, those are the numbers,” he said. “The only solution that we have been given is cut across the board.”
The Kane County Finance and Budget Committee previously proposed a number of cuts to the budget, but the majority of those cuts were later taken out by the Executive Committee.
Around $11 million in cuts previously recommended by the Finance and Budget Committee were removed from the budget before it was put on display as a draft in September, according to past reporting.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
