Denton County commissioners were presented with a proposed $418 million budget for the 2025 fiscal year during Tuesday morning’s meeting.
The proposed budget will fund public safety but may not include overtime costs. It also budgets for opening the county’s new district court, and it has a proposed tax rate that is a fraction of a cent lower than the current rate.
Commissioners will vote on the budget in September and will hold three budget workshops beginning next Tuesday.
Proposed budget breakdown
Alejandro Moreno, Denton County’s budget officer, talked about the challenges and highlights of preparing the budget. One main challenge was the cost of overtime pay for staff at the Denton County Jail.
Of the proposed $418 million in expenditures in the budget, about $6 million will go to public safety funding, including new positions, increased costs for food and paper products at the jail, and increases in fire service funding, prisoner transport expenses, psychiatric services and court-ordered expenses for juveniles.
“Currently, we’re estimating to utilize about $2 million in an unincorporated contingency to cover the cost of the county jail,” Moreno told the commissioners early on in his presentation. “For FY 2025, one of the things that we’re doing is that we’re increasing our contingency funding to make sure we have sufficient funds next year in order to allocate overtime if the amount of overtime doesn’t continue to decrease in FY 2025.”
Precinct 1 Commissioner Ryan Williams later asked Moreno to clarify whether overtime pay would be included in the proposed public safety budget.
Moreno said overtime would not be included in the public safety fund but would instead be funded through contingency funding.
Contingency funding is a set amount of money that’s reserved to cover unexpected costs or emergencies.
“That’s because we are not including an increase specifically in the county jail budget, so instead, we’re budgeting for the increase of contingency [funding] in the hopes that overtime begins to decrease,” Moreno said in response to Williams.
About $3.4 million would go to the judicial and legal division due to the new district court, new positions, an increase in court-related expenditures and an increase in the cost of evidence software for the district attorney’s office.
Moreno noted that the new 477th District Court will be active starting Jan. 1. The court will have six new positions with salaries totaling about $583,000.
“So over the past several years, the county has been adding new district courts,” Moreno said. “If the county continues to grow in the future, that is probably a cost that we will continue to see in future budget years as well.”
About $2 million is proposed to fund technology services for new positions and an increase in software and technology maintenance costs.
The proposed budget also includes $2.3 million for road and bridge improvements. The county plans to increase the amount used to pay for roads in a “pay-as-you-go” system rather than issuing debt for county roads.
About $172,000 will go to the election office budget because of this year’s presidential election on Nov. 5. Moreno said the proposed election budget will help pay for election judges and miscellaneous expenses.
The county’s fiscal year begins in October.
Proposed tax rate
Moreno recommended a proposed property tax rate of 18.8006 cents per $100 property valuation, a reduction from the current rate of 18.9485 cents.
That’s a decrease of about 0.15 of a penny. Under the proposed rate, the owner of a home valued at $300,000 would pay $564.02 on the Denton County portion of their tax bill — $4.44 less than under the current property tax rate.
Moreno told the commissioners that Denton County’s property tax rate last year was the seventh-lowest among the 254 counties in the state. Denton County is again expected to have its lowest tax rate since 1986.