By Benjamin Rothstein

DOVER – Kent County Levy Court has continued its weekslong discussions regarding its Fiscal Year 2025 budget. Three departments have had their turn in front of Levy Court recently — facilities, planning and finance.

The department of facilities management presented its budget review at the March 27 workshop, discussing both its short- and long-term projects as it was strategic impact director Josh Bell’s final appearance in front of Levy Court before he left his position at the county.

Mr. Bell asked for a series of increases as part of the FY25 budget, including adding an on-call schedule for his staff, an increase in training expenses from $0 to $1,000 per employee, and custodial equipment replacement. Many other expenses were higher simply due to rising prices.

The county is making an active effort to centralize its information technology services, which were originally separated on a per-department basis, removing that expense from other budgets.

Some more longterm, or capital projects, that Mr. Bell spoke of include roof and flooring replacements, as well as landscaping, the expenses for which are staying the same as last year. New this year is $100,000 toward security enhancements, with a goal of $500,000, with $300,000 stashed for it, as of FY24.

The next budget workshop, which took place on Wednesday, discussed both planning and finance.

Planning, headed up by Sarah Keifer, showed increases in personnel costs and software. To help offset it, Ms. Keifer brought up the possibility of outsourcing the Geographic Information System administrator position, a job within the county that is currently filled.

“Based on the estimates we’ve gotten, it will cost roughly half of what the position costs and will garner us an entire team of people to help support GIS, back-end GIS that keeps everything running,” said Ms. Keifer.

Levy Court Commissioner Joanne Masten asked if the person currently in the position would get the opportunity to find a position elsewhere in the county, to which human resources director Trudena Horsey confirmed that the employee would get the chance to work elsewhere in the county. Yet, the planning office has no open positions, and the employee would have to first qualify and then interview any for subsequent county job.

Kent County administrator Ken Decker noted some of the advantages to outsourcing.

“As an analogy, think of the difference between hiring of a mechanic internally or having a contract with a service garage that has a large number of mechanics with different expertise (like) transmissions or engines,” said Mr. Decker.

“A single person who can do all of that commands, normally, a very high price on the market.”

Finance was presented by director Susan Durham, who spent some time discussing the departments wrestling with Munis, a financial management software that the county transitioned to over the past couple of years.

“The software we found out, with Munis and everything, does not save us time,” said Ms. Durham.

“Munis was sold as an integrated solution. It is not,” said Mr. Decker. “It is sort of a conglomeration of different software packages that have been, in some cases, not very well glued together, but what was sold as a sort of one-piece turnkey, you know, fire and forget this whole software.”

The next budget meeting will take place Wednesday at 5 p.m. at the Levy Court Building in Dover.