County Board Of Supervisors Approves FY27 Budget

The Mills County Board Of Supervisors approved its budget for the 2026-2027 fiscal year last Tuesday following a brief public hearing at the Mills County Courthouse.
The budget, which includes an urban property tax levy rate of $5.89833 (per $1,000 taxable valuation) and a rural property rate of $9,84833, was approved by a 2-1 margin with supervisors Richard Crouch and Lonnie Mayberry voting for approval and Jack Sayers casting a “Nah” vote.

“I think the budget overall is pretty good, however, there are some things that I would like to see cut,” Sayers stated.

Sayers noted that Mills County has one of the top 10 highest tax rates in Iowa and he’d rather see the county earn a high ranking in other areas, such as affordability and schools.

“I like having good services, I like having a short wait time for the treasurer’s office, I like having a large public health that provides services, and I like having a lot of these things,” he said. “What I don’t like having is Mills County having, for this year, the 9th highest tax rate for a county in the state of Iowa. I have some concerns with that and I don’t think a top 10 for high taxes is where we’d like to be.”

Crouch questioned why Sayers didn’t voice his concerns during previous budget discussions.

Audience member Chris Weide also voiced concerns about the budget.

“As written, I’m not in favor of the proposed budget for a number of reasons. No. 1, it’s not a balanced budget It projects you’ll spend about $1.5 million more than the projected revenue,” said Weide. “I would like to see a 10% reduction in the upcoming year budget, and if we adjusted that for inflation, that means you would have to cut about 6.6%. So, if you did that, the budget in my mind for expenditures would be $26 million as opposed to your $28 (million). That would be a balanced budget. Not only would we be 10% less, which is where I think we should be striving for, you would end up with a balanced budget. In fact, we would have $300,000 to put into the reserves as opposed to spending $1.5 million out of the reserves. I don’t think we can continue a trajectory of overspending every year.”
Weide also questioned the county’s use of Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) revenue.

“I would like to see more of the LOST money go to reducing debt and reducing the property tax burden,” he said. “ I don’t see any line item in the posted budget where any LOST money is being used for that.”
Mills County Auditor Amber Farnan addressed concerns expressed by Weide.

“The reason that there is that deficit is that we are trying to spend down some of the excess funds that we have,” she said. “So, for like our general supplemental that takes care of IPERS and FICA and all of our benefits, we don’t usually spend everything that we budget for so that I can give them ideas on how we can reduce that levy, which we were able to do this year.

“We won’t spend it all, but we have to budget for some type of worst-case scenario so usually we spend about 80-85% of our budget that’s proposed. We usually don’t it all. So, that negative you’re seeing is partially because we are spending down some the excess funds that we have in general supplemental that we are required by law to have a smaller balance for because we’re only supposed to tax for what we need, which is what we’re trying to do.”

Fanan also addressed the LOST revenue.

“The ballot that was approved by the Mills County voters was 40% property tax relief, 40% betterment, and 20% of infrastructure,” she said “So, we usually give engineering or secondary roads that 40% or better to help offset some of their costs.”

Iowa counties are required to have their budgets certified with the state by the end of April.