County Budget Recap and BOS notes

A $50,000 addition to the school portion of Botetourt County’s fiscal year 2019-2020 budget made the school system finances a little less tight after the Board of Supervisors agreed to give them additional funding prior to approving the budget and tax rate at the April Board meeting.

However, residents in Daleville who have been waiting on improvements to Glebe Road will be disappointed to learn their wait likely will grow by decades. That’s because the Supervisors agreed with a Virginia Department of Transportation representative that the only way to fund fixes to Murray Road so the road can handle the traffic for the new elementary school in Blue Ridge was to take funding set aside for improvements to Glebe Road and use it elsewhere.

Budget

The county approved a $100.9 million budget, an increase of 4.1 percent over the current fiscal year.

The county kept the real estate tax rate at 79 cents per $100 of assessed value because of an anticipated 5 percent increase in local revenues. The county also did not dip into its reserve funds to balance the budget.

The county’s share of the budget is $66.2 million. The remaining $24.9 million goes to the school system, which received a 2.8 percent increase in funding from all sources.

The school system had requested an additional $500,000 from the county for the upcoming fiscal year, but the Supervisors only advertised an increase of $400,000. The Supervisors seemed set to approve that amount, but Fincastle District Supervisor Richard Bailey requested that $50,000 that had been set aside for the county’s contingency fund be placed into the school budget instead. That gave the schools a total of $450,000 in new money.

Valley District Supervisor Mac Scothorn said during discussion of the budget that he hopes the school system and the county officials can find a way to work together better for the betterment of all. Buchanan District Supervisor Ray Sloan said the additional funding should insure that agriculture remains a focus of the school curriculum. He added that the state’s agriculture and forest industry amounts to about $91 billion in economic input.

“The members of rural Botetourt will lead the charge to feed our nation,” Sloan said.

The budget with the $50,000 increase to the schools was approved unanimously.

Glebe Road

The Supervisors also looked at another pot of money for roads during a work session with VDOT for the secondary road system. These state funds amount to $404,000 for fiscal year 2020, with a total pot of $2.6 million spread across six years.

Glebe Road was next on the list to receive funding, but the Supervisors were told it would take years before the necessary dollars would be available. In the meantime, the county needs to take care of Murray Road (Rt. 771) because of the new elementary school in Blue Ridge. The new school is presently under construction and expected to be completed in 2020.

Construction on Murray Road was expected to exceed $700,000 and it needs to be completed prior to the opening of the school, VDOT officials said.

Amsterdam District Supervisor Steve Clinton took exception to the change because Glebe Road has been on the plan for at least a decade, and asked that the road at least remain on the plan, even if unfunded.

That dropped Glebe Road improvements to last place on a list of seven other road on the county’s road plan.

The Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing on the six-year plan for the secondary road system at the May meeting.

–Anita Firebaugh, Special to the Botetourt Bee, Photo by Anita Firebaugh