Three years plan to solve Imperial Valley’s County budget problems

The Imperial County Board of Supervisors agreed to a three-year plan to fix the county’s budget problem.

Over the last five years, the county has accumulated a deficit of almost $33 million in its budget.

Deputy County Executive Officer, Mayra Widmann, said one of the leading factors to the deficit was the rise in expenses as revenue stayed the same.

Widmann said, “Over the years what we were hoping that new businesses were going to come in. There was going to be a boom in the economy. We probably were hopeful that we’re going to get more self-set revenue. Property taxes were going to go up.”

Widmann said the county will also implement a hiring freeze of 200 vacant positions which would save the county $6 million in one fiscal year.

“It’s important to continue keeping our current staff. We don’t want to do any layoffs that’s important to be able to manage that and keep the employees that we have,” said Widmann.

District Supervisor, Jesus Escobar said there’ll also be cutbacks in county departments as well.

“We want to cut excess expenses. We want to be run more efficiently, more effectively. We want to be able to support our employees because again it’s a three-year window. What happens at the end of year three if you’re not aggressive enough? We don’t want to go back to the well three years from now,” said Escobar.

Escobar added that if everything goes according to plan, after the three years, the county’s budget will no longer be deficient.

Escobar said, “If everything breaks our way at the end of this three year period if we only do what was presented yesterday, we’d have approximately $4.2 million in reserves.”

Widmann said that the current general funds for this fiscal year is close to $7 million and county officials will continue to look for ways to bring money to the county.