Financial discussion: Washington commissioners hold a finance-focused meeting | News, Sports, Jobs

(Photo by Amber Phipps)
The Washington County Commission met with Auditor Matthew Livengood, Treasurer Tammy Bates and Prosecutor Nicole Coil to review the county financial report.

The Washington County Commission held its first finance meeting of the year Wednesday morning and began by reviewing the details of the previous year’s financial summary.

Washington County Auditor Matthew Livengood presented the financial reports that detailed the county’s balance, revenue and sales taxes.

The auditor treasure balance report states that the county has a balance of $53,423,450.52. In terms of sales tax, everything was similar to last year around the same time except for a slight increase in internet sales tax. It’s 2.67% higher than in 2024.

Real estate is down by about $10,000 compared to this time last year.

“I heard a statistic the other day that five years ago there were over 400 homes for sale in our general region and now that’s just over 100,” said Commission President Charlie Schilling.

According to Livengood, the target revenue is around 17% and the county is currently sitting at around 16% revenue.

“That does not take into account the tax dollars Tammy has collected so we’re actually in a really good position,” said Livengood, referring to County Treasurer Tammy Bates.

Official also continued the ongoing discussion about utility bill late fees and potential solutions.

The agenda for the weekly commission meetings has recently been including requests to pay off late fees from utility bills that didn’t make it in on time. This has been a recurring problem due to multiple factors that are out of the control of the department.

The auditor’s office stops accepting bills after noon on Monday which means that any bill that comes in through the mail after that time won’t make it to be paid, especially if there’s a delay in the mail.

There have been discussions from county departments to switch to paperless billing but oftentimes the departments have run into obstacles that prevent them from having access to the online account.

“I think a solution could be if we were able to approve bills out of this office at 8:59 on Thursday morning right before the meeting so they go out that week,” said Schilling. “That alleviates four to five business days within the process so they can go out earlier.”

County Clerk Ben Cowdery said that sometimes a bill will come in Tuesday afternoon and since it’s past the deadline, the bill wouldn’t go out in the mail until the following Friday.

Bates said a lot of this could be eliminated through paperless billing.

In order to switch entirely to paperless billing, the departments would have to switch the authorized personnel for the accounts. This presented another challenge for accounts that had authorized personnel who no longer work for the county.

“So he (Rick Peoples) would have needed to have a list of every single utility bill from every single department and called Frontier for every one of those and say, ‘switch it over to Ben,’” said county engineer Roger Wright. “That’s why it’s been very difficult to effect change with those utilities.”

As a solution, Schilling suggested reaching out to Peoples who was the previous county clerk and fixing the authorization issue. The next suggestion was to move the day that bills were accepted from Monday at noon to Wednesday at 4:30 p.m.

“As far as I’m concerned we need to adjust our process to fill that gap of two to three days each week of how these bills get approved,” said Schilling. “And I’m confident that it’ll fix maybe all of the problems.”