Correction: Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024
Editor’s note: Today’s edition was corrected to list Troy Merrick as the first speaker on a candidate question. Although the online version is correct, I want to ensure the accurate version also reaches each email inbox. My apologies for the confusion. - Kristiaan Rawlings
If elected, what three steps would you take to put our county in a more advantageous financial footing?
Troy Merrick, Republican: Our goal as a whole would be to achieve a balanced budget while implementing a long-term financial plan. That financial plan should be reviewed annually to make sure to accommodate necessary updates and changes, plus it would be essential for everybody on the board to be transparent, to let the public know what's going on, as far as the budget goes, which I think, I’m not on county council yet, but I think you can come in to those meetings, or you can find some of that online.
Charity Mohr, Republican: I have on this one, responsible growth and development. The tax revenue from those things would help our financial footing. Housing, again, the tax revenue from that, we can attract businesses that want to put jobs into our community, then we can have people live here and give back to our community. Those are all ways of generating revenue in a responsible way for our community. And the last one is just kind of a balance of our rural heritage and preservation of farmland.
Jeremy Ruble, Republican: Like I mentioned before, I think our county lacks a lot of standard operating procedures coming from industry. It’s something I think we can focus on within the county government. For example, setting procedures in place of how to evaluate different projects that may come before us, such as ERAs, tax abatements, some of the tools that are given to us to utilize. Some of those can be done and used for the good and a lot of times they get used. Encouraging responsible housing growth; additional people brings in additional revenue. Beautification projects around our community is a good thing to help draw in potential businesses.
Chase Yanzer, Democrat: As I discussed in the previous question, I would like to research and discuss opportunities to develop county sources of funding. We know that creating income streams for the county outside of traditional taxing arrangements could go a long way in ensuring financial security in the future. Additionally, I would like to investigate local road funding sources and determine why other counties generate so much in local road funding dollars compared to ours. For instance, why did Johnson County receive over $60 million in local road funding dollars in 2023 compared to Shelbyville County’s $900,000? It could be that we are missing an opportunity to help fund our local roads, and I would like to investigate and correct this, if we are. And then lastly, I would like to research and discuss potential cost savings by identifying opportunities to bring work in-house that is currently being subcontracted. This could be a way to provide high quality, good, paying county jobs to our community, while also saving our county money.