The way Kane County is going about its 2025 budget proposal process may go against state law, Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser said at a recent Kane County Board committee meeting.
She told the Kane County Board Finance and Budget Committee at its meeting on June 26 that her office and others are being restricted from submitting the budgets they believe are needed to properly operate next year.
The committee previously directed Kane County Finance Director Kathleen Hopkinson to limit the yearly increases and number of vacant positions requested in county offices’ and departments’ budget proposals.
While the Kane County Board will make the final decision on what is budgeted to each office and department, elected officials must be allowed full control over their budget proposals, and it is against state law to restrict that control, according to Mosser.
“Ultimately, you will give us the budget that you can give us based on the justifications that we meet or do not meet. That is legally how this process needs to go,” she told committee members. “But up until that point, we have had a frustrated budget process system.”
Some committee members appeared concerned about Mosser’s warnings.
District 2 County Board member Dale Berman, who is the chair of the Finance and Budget Committee, said the new requirements were supposed to make the budgeting process quicker and easier, as the board would have less to cut from budget proposals and department heads would be making the decisions on where funds were most needed.
However, if the mandates were actually slowing down the process, he said they should be taken only as suggestions, and that offices and departments should simply send in whatever budget request they wanted, while understanding that cuts would likely be made to those proposals.
“That is all that we’re asking for,” Mosser said.
In a phone call on Monday, Kane County Assistant State’s Attorney John Frank said it is too early to tell if the Finance Department will follow Berman’s statements, which were not voted on by the Finance Committee members. If the department does follow his guidance, however, it would fix the issue, he said.
District 21 County Board member Clifford Surges, who brought the issue up to the board after seeing emails between Mosser and Hopkinson, said he was concerned that Mosser was giving legal advice about how she is governed by the Kane County Board and its committees.
He suggested the Kane County Board might want to look into bringing in outside legal counsel on the issue.
Mosser dismissed Surges’ concerns of a conflict of interest and said it is her job to give legal advice to the county, which she said she keeps separate from her feelings about her own office.
“A disagreement with my legal advice does not a conflict make,” she said.
The issue was first addressed internally, according to Frank and Mosser. They said it was only brought to the County Board because they believe their office’s legal advice — that elected officials have full control over their offices’ budget proposals — was not being followed by the county’s Finance Department.
“If it is true that this committee or the board is instructing the finance chair to restrict elected officials to certain vacant positions or to restrict them that they cannot put in a cost of living that is over a certain amount, then I am advising all of you legally that you cannot do that,” Mosser said.
The budget proposal restrictions came out of discussions at the Kane County Board Finance Committee over the past several months about ways to balance the 2025 budget.
Hopkinson previously proposed that departments and offices limit the number of open positions and keep their budgets below a 3% increase over last year. Even with the restrictions, the county would likely need to spend roughly $11 million from its reserves to balance the 2025 budget unless another source of revenue is found, she previously said.
Plus, if the county does not find a way to balance yearly budgets by 2027, it will need to dip into required reserves to continue operating, according to previous reporting.
Finance Committee members agreed with her recommendations at the time but made no formal vote about the requirement.
The offices of the Kane County sheriff, state’s attorney and treasurer are now being restricted from submitting their desired budget proposals, Mosser said at the June 24 meeting. Kane County Auditor Penny Wegman told the Finance Committee that her office was also in the same position.
Mosser and Wegman said they were “locked out” of certain features of New World, the county’s finance software, that were related to the budget. Hopkinson said the Finance Department was not able to lock anyone out of the software, since that is not even one of the software’s features.
Payroll is not submitted through New World, which may be why it appears some features are unavailable, Hopkinson said. Instead, county offices and departments must send their payroll budgets to the Finance Department, and its staff members put those numbers into the software.
That process has been in place for years, according to Hopkinson. She said there were previous technical issues preventing the offices from using the software properly, but those have been resolved.
In Monday’s phone call, Frank and Mosser said the current issue is not technical, either. According to Frank, the county’s Finance Department has not been allowing the offices of elected officials to submit their payroll budget unless they follow the vacant position limits.
In other cases, the Finance Department has created its own estimates of the office’s payroll budget based on the vacant position limits and loaded those estimates into the county’s financial software, he said.
Because they do not have a payroll budget, which makes up the majority of any county office or department budget, certain offices of elected officials are unable to build out the rest of their budgets, according to Frank.
The issue was still ongoing at the time of the Monday phone call, according to both Frank and Mosser.
At the Kane County Board Executive Committee meeting on Wednesday, Hopkinson said she hopes to have all office and department budget proposals in by July 8 at the latest, with the budget proposal process fully completed by July 9 at the end of the day. After that point, the offices and departments will not be able to change their budget proposals, she said at the meeting.
The next step in the process is for each department and office to present their budget proposals to their related committee, which should happen throughout the month of July, according to Hopkinson.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
