News File Photo The Alpena County Courthouse is seen in this April 2020 News archive photo.

ALPENA — Alpena County is out of Band-Aids.

That is how county Treasurer Kim Ludlow described the county’s financial situation after the county board nearly emptied several funds to cut into a large budget shortfall to prevent layoffs.

The Board of Commissioners met for nearly four hours today and decided to pull $281,988 from the county’s stabilization fund, a rainy-day fund, and an additional $126,664 left over from the county’s state contract for providing security at the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center.

Those moves, officials hope, will keep the county’s savings above 24.97% of yearly expenses by the end of this year. County policy calls for job cuts if the savings falls below that amount.

Despite those moves, the county is still staring at a $1.3 million budget shortfall by the end of this year and a projected shortfall as high as $1.5 million by the end of next year if drastic measures aren’t taken.

“This is only a Band-Aid, but, once this Band-Aid is gone, it’s gone,” Ludlow said.

The county currently expects to end this budget year with about $2.9 million in that savings account, after it covers the $1.3 million gap between revenue and expenses. It is projected to shrink to nearly $1.3 million at the end of 2021 if there isn’t drastic action taken.

Commissioners also considered cutting secondary road patrol from the Sheriff’s Office, cutting the county’s deputy on the Huron Undercover Narcotics Team, cutting the county’s school liaison officer, and cutting a special investigator from the county Prosecutor’s Office.

Those jobs, and others, appear safe for now, but Commissioner John Kozlowski said that, if the county doesn’t cut or create a new source of revenue soon, everything could be worse when commissioners craft the 2022 budget.

For the most part, commissioners rubber-stamped all of the budget requests submitted to them by department heads.

“We are taking the easy way out and we just keep kicking the can down the road,” Kozlowski said. “We just used almost everything we had, and we didn’t even address the issues.”

The board did make one significant change to the 2021 budget.

It intended to allocate $382,000 to the Alpena County Regional Airport for operations and a bond payment, but decided to cut that allocation in half because the airport is expecting about $500,000 in reimbursement funds from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The airport received a nearly $18 million federal grant earlier this year, but the county must pay up front for any operational or equipment purchases before getting the money back from the feds.

Right now, the county is unsure when the FAA will send it a check, but Commissioner Bob Adrian said he is confident the county will receive what it is owed.

“I don’t think there is an issue of us getting the money, it is just a matter of when,” he said. “It could be early in the year, or it could be in 2022. I don’t think it will be that long, because the airport manager has been working on it.”

For a spell TODAY, it appeared cuts to the county’s police force and courts were imminent.

Commissioner Brenda Fournier proposed layoffs for the HUNT deputy, secondary road patrol, the Prosecutor’s Office investigator, and the liaison officer. The move would have shaved $190,023 off the expense side of the ledger.

After receiving little support from her fellow commissioners, she pulled her motion from consideration.

“These are hard decisions and they have to be made,” she said. “We did the same thing last year.”

Commissioner Brad McRoberts, who worked at the Sheriff’s Office for many years, said cutting road patrol and HUNT would put residents at risk, especially those who live in more rural areas of the county.

“When something happens in the middle of the night, who is going to respond?” McRoberts said. “The State Police are spread thin and cover five counties, and the city won’t do it. We aren’t going to have anyone, or it is going to take a long time for someone to get there.”

Ludlow said commissioners need to begin planning for future budgets if they don’t want to see the yearly budget shortfalls continue to grow.

The county is on the hook for almost $1 million for unfunded employee retirement obligations, and that number is going to stay high for years. Setting priorities now could ease financial burdens later, she said.

“Without a long-range plan, this is where you end up,” Ludlow said. “If you don’t stop and think about how you’re going to pay for increases in expenses, when you’re not adding revenue, you’re not doing what needs to be done. I don’t think we have looked at this realistically.”