As each Seward County Seward department has come to the board of commissioners with its proposed 2025-26 budget, Chair Misty Ahmic has the same cautionary notes.
“It is not personal,” comes first.
The board reviews every department’s budget pretty much line by line, looking for every $50, $100 or bigger expenditures that could be cut.
“We have been very frugal and prioritized our needs and wants,” Ahmic said in a recent interview. “I really appreciate our officials. They really came to the table.”
Minimizing professional development travel, questioning the details on items ranging from the jail’s staff scheduling methods to avoid any overtime to printing and postage costs in the extension office.
“We are going to have a bare bone, skeleton budget,” Commissioner Raegan Hain said at one departmental review. “I know we did not have budget issues this year, but there were several departments who had overages.”
Some of those overages were and will be inevitable because the county cannot control some of the services it must provide each year. Ahmic told department leaders to trust that the board had some reserve funds if they have new needs arise, but she did not want them to build those funds into their own budgets.
With every department, Ahmic reiterated that Seward County’s priority this year is bringing some employees’ wages up to competitive levels.
The county is utilizing the Nebraska Association of County Officials’ database to help it determine competitive salary-ranges by position. The database was created about three years ago with Seward County’s urging, Ahmic said.
While Seward County and others often did benchmarking for starting wages, the database is more in depth and allows them to sort data in different ways to factor in job characteristics, markets for some jobs and the impact of being close to Lincoln or other areas where there are similar jobs.
“Some positions are getting close to an 18% increase,” she said.
That does not include the accompanying increases in the employers’ portion of Social Security and other benefits. She said the average individual increase is under 10%.
But some departments will see more. The highway department’s budget line for wages will be about $160,000 higher.
That department has had to use hiring bonuses in recent months to get and try to keep road grader operator and road construction positions filled.
“We are not going to be at the top of the list, but we certainly do not want to be under-paying people,” Ahmic said.
Some roads positions were not being paid at “decent” levels in previous years, Ahmic said.
But the increases require little growth, if not cuts, in other areas to keep the overall budget down.
“Most of our employees live in the county, so we are being stewards of their money, too.
“Seward County is really lucky, I think. We have really good officials, either appointed or elected,” Ahmic said, after spending much of July 29 in budget sessions with the board of commissioners.
They are expecting to finish one more department review on Aug. 5 and hear back from some department leaders who were asked to reconsider some budget items.
Ahmic said the county will finalize the proposed budget and submit information to the Seward County assessor and clerk in August. The county has scheduled its Nebraska Unicameral-required “pink postcard” budget hearing for Sept. 22, after which most taxing entities will conduct their final public hearings on their own budgets and finalize the tax-asking each requires.
Any entities increasing their tax asking by more than 2% plus real growth percentages must participate in an additional “pink postcard” hearing in addition to their own public hearings before the budgets are finalized by Sept. 30 for the 2025-26 tax levy. For 2024-25, the county’s portion of tax revenue was $10,322,427.
The state legislature requires zero percent increase in the levy with exceptions made for public safety expenditures, including county attorneys, public defenders, E911 operations, jails and the sheriff’s budget.
The county’s tax-asking is combined with the school districts, village boards, city council, airport authority, and any other taxing entities, and the county assessor’s office determines the totals for each property in the county based on their location.
Last year, the county was able to reduce its levy – just for the portion of property tax that funds county services – by 2 cents, Ahmic aid.
The county’s budget year runs from July 1 to June 30, but it, like other Nebraska tax-funded entities, cannot finalize the budget until September.
