Ozark County passes $6 million budget which includes raises for employees

The Ozark County Commissioners have finalized the 2025 county budget, which allows for just over $6 million in spending this year. 

Officials are estimating that approximately $5.3 million in revenue will be received by the county, paired with $1.6 million left from 2024, which gives the county a total appropriation knocking on the door of $7 million.

Ozark County Budget Officer Brian Wise broke down some of the high points of the new budget in a recent interview with the Times. All amounts are rounded to help streamline the text.

The budget is outlined in full in a 192-page document available at the Ozark County Clerk’s office. Wise says he’s more than happy to chat with residents about the budget and any questions they have about it or county spending. Those who would like to remain anonymous when calling are more than welcome to do so.

“I’d be happy to walk anyone through any questions about the budget. I say this all the time, and I really, really mean it. If you can go straight to the horse’s mouth instead of asking questions online or on social media, we’ll happily answer all of them. We love questions. We wish people would ask more questions. We really, really do,” Wise said. “And we’ll never ask who you are."

Wise said that residents can call him during regular business hours at the Ozark County Clerk’s office 417-679-3516 or email ozark.county@sos.mo.gov. 

Cost of living raise

The most notable change to the 2025 budget is a 6% cost-of-living salary adjustment for all county officeholders and their employees. The raise affects the Ozark County Commissioners, County Clerk, Public Administrator, Sheriff, Assessor, Collector, Treasurer, Recorder, Prosecuting Attorney and Coroner, along with all of the hourly county employees that work under those elected officials. 

The 6% raise for Ozark County officeholders was voted in unanimously by the Ozark County Salary Commission last September, securing the first raise for the officials since 2021. The amount is in line with the Social Security Administration’s current calculation that the cost of living has increased 5.9% during that time. 

Missouri law dictates that elected officials must raise the wages of their hourly employees by at least the same percentage or more than the officeholders’ adjustment. Most hourly county employees were given a raise that equated to slightly more than 6% of their pay, officials say.

  Five main funds and a bunch of little ones

Wise told the Times that it’s helpful to note that while the budget has more than 30 different funds, there are basically five main areas that amount to most of the county’s operation: general revenue, assessor’s office, law enforcement, road and bridge west and road and bridge east. 

The general revenue fund is really the most versatile workhorse of all the funds in the county’s budget. It includes money coming in and out of all county offices with the exception of the assessor’s office (which by law has to have a separate fund in class three counties like Ozark County). 

So that means the general revenue fund includes costs and revenue from the county commissioners, county clerk, treasurer, collector, recorder of deeds, public administrator, prosecuting attorney’s office, along with part of the circuit clerk’s office (which is split between the county and state). The fund also includes paying for utilities for all offices in the courthouse, putting on elections, funding county building and grounds updates, paying employee fringe benefits and a few other various items. 

Last year, the county budgeted $1,797,000 in spending for general revenue and spent about $7,000 shy of that amount. This year’s budget for general revenue is just slightly higher. 

The budget shows that the county brought in a total of $1.8 million for the general revenue fund last year, and the bulk of that came from over $1 million in sales tax. For general revenue, the county collects 1 cent of sales tax for every dollar residents spend at stores within the county. It also collected the 1 cent sales tax from online sales made by Ozark County residents since the “use tax” was passed here last April. 

Other revenue streams for the general revenue fund included $200,000 in property tax, various grants and intergovernmental funds, charges for services, interest made from the fund, the sale of trash and recyclables and a health insurance reimbursement. 

We’ll break down a few areas of notable change in the general revenue budget below.

County Commission 2024 spending skewed with purchase of recycling center land

The county commissioners' portion of the general revenue budget (which does not include their road and bridge crews) was set at $137,400 for 2025, a similar amount as last year. 

At first glance, the commission’s $170,000 spent in 2024 might look like a red flag, but Wise said there is a good explanation for the fund appearing noticeably over budget.

“The numbers showing what we actually spent for 2024 on the county commission side of things are a little skewed because…when we bought the land for the recycling center, we didn’t have a line item for purchasing land,” Wise said, referencing a piece of property the county purchased last fall. The property adjoins the current Ozark County Recycling Center property, and the county hopes to eventually build a new recycling center on the new property. “When we buy something that’s new, if we don’t have a line item to pay it out of, we have to find somewhere for it to land in the budget. We don’t have a ‘new property’ line item, so this landed on the county commission side of things.”

Odd year means less spent on elections

Another notable change is a decreased budget for Ozark County elections. Wise said that because it is an odd-numbered year, there won’t be as much election activity for the county to pay for compared with even-numbered years when several county and state offices are on the ballot. 

Because of that fact, the election fund was automatically budgeted $35,000 less this year than in 2024. 

There will still be an April General Municipal Election where voters will decide various municipal and school boards seats, and there will also be the option to place various measures on the ballot if the county or local municipalities choose to do so in the fall. 

Last year, the county budgeted $93,000 for elections and spent $78,000. This year, the county has budgeted about $53,000 and anticipates it will come in below budget. 

Buildings and grounds budget for about $50k in renovations

The buildings and grounds portion of the general revenue budget allows for up to $131,600 spent for 2025. That amount includes a lot of necessity items such as electricity, propane, water and sewer, trash collection, telephones, lawn care and more. It also includes the continued budgeted facility upgrades for the courthouse. Last year, the county spent about $70,000 on renovations and repairs, and they’ve budgeted about $50,000 this year for that purpose. 

“We’re still looking at updating some things including flooring, computer networks and some cyber security throughout the courthouse,” Wise said.

“I always doubt that we’re ever going to get to these numbers, because we haven’t ever gone over budget on general revenue since I’ve been here,” Wise said. “We always shoot really high on what we think our expenses are going to be, and we take it down a notch on our revenues. That basically builds in a double emergency fund. We don’t want the budget to be down to the closest penny, because we can’t work through that tight of the budget. When you’re talking about renovations, for instance, there can be a lot of fluctuation in the cost of materials, and you just don’t know what you’re going to find especially with a building this old.”

Wise said, that as an example, the floor in the county clerk’s office where his office is located will be replaced this year. The courthouse was built in the 1930s and the floor is noticeably sloped. Will the uneven surface cause complications with the new flooring? It’s hard to say until the flooring workers start on the project. 

Recycling center had its best year in 2024 but still runs in the red

The Ozark County Recycling Center, which is owned and operated by the county, is another portion of the general revenue budget that Wise discussed. 

“The recycling center is always in the red. It probably will always will be in the red, but it’s a service that we’ll bend over backward to try and keep. Recycling centers are dying quickly,” Wise said, referencing the now-closed private Douglas County recycling center as an example of one that has closed. “It’s a great service, and it does several things for the county. We just know that it’s never going to be in the black. It’s just not going to get there.”

The 2025 budget allows for $159,000 in spending to operate the recycling center. Last year, it took around $142,000 to keep the facility functional. The center brought in approximately $33,000 in revenue from the sale of the recyclables and trash, which was paired with just over $40,000 in grant funds to help offset recycling center employee wages. 

“I think it’s definitely worth noting that we have new management at the recycling center, and he’s working his tail off and doing a really good job,” Wise said, referencing current Ozark County Recycling Center Manager Michael King. “In 2023, their trash and recyclables receipts brought in $18 [thousand] and some change. In 2024, that went up to $33,000. That’s the best year that I remember them ever having. But even with them making as much money as it did and the $40,000 grant, they are still in the red by a very noticeable margin. We expect it, and we are really proud of how our recycling center is running” he said. 

Law enforcement, by nature, is supplemented by general revenue

Another big fund is the Ozark County Law Enforcement fund, which is budgeted at about $1.1 million in spending for 2025. There was about $1.2 million in actual spending from the fund in 2024. 

The county anticipates it will receive about $1.1 million in revenue, which includes about $573,000 received in sales tax. That amount comes from a half-cent sales tax that is collected on every dollar spent at Ozark County stores or by local residents online. The law enforcement fund also receives revenue from grants and intergovernmental revenue, contracts with the City of Gainesville and Village of Theodosia to provide law enforcement in those locations, charges for services and usually a transfer in from the general revenue fund. 

“Basically, it is set up to hopefully break even, but it’s really, really hard for them to even stand a chance at breaking even,” Wise said.”So, whenever the sheriff’s department comes up short - if they don’t have enough money in the bank to cover their bills or payroll, then the general revenue fund comes in and covers all that. And that’s how we keep them rolling. It’s been that way ever since the law enforcement sales tax was passed sometime in the early 1990s. It’s been subsidized by general revenue ever since.”

Wise said that Ozark County’s officials have spoken with both Rep. Matthew Overcast and Sen. Brad Hudson, both in their first-year terms, about continuing the effort that former Rep. Travis Smith started to allow the county to collect an additional half-cent sales tax for law enforcement, which was voted in by local residents in 2022. Shortly after the tax was passed, the Missouri Department of Revenue notified the county that it was unable to collect it due to the state’s limit of aggregate sales tax allowed under state law. 

Hudson has filed SB547 to address the issue, which had its first reading Jan. 9. Wise said they have no idea if the bill will make it into law, therefore it isn’t anticipated or budgeted, but they’re keeping an eye on it this session. 

He also said that the Ozark County Jail has undergone extensive renovations over the last three years. “We’ve got the building itself to a really good point, and it’s a lot different than when [Sheriff] Cass [Martin] first took office. We’re very proud of that,” he said.

“Most everything in the [law enforcement] budget has gone down for 2025. Computer expenses were one area that went down. In 2024, we spent about $60,000 changing everything that had to do with the computer systems in the sheriff’s department - everything from opening jail doors to replacing regular desktops. In 2025, that went from $60,000 down to their request of $24,000. There are several items like that - that were bigger last year, but they didn’t request as much this year. That’s going to be the trend since upgrading and updating that building has peaked, and now we’re just maintaining the condition [of the sheriff’s department and jail]. There’s always going to be upgrades, and we’re always going to look at doing stuff to make it better, but the big, expensive stuff has been done,” Wise said. 

The building has received several hundred thousand dollars in renovations and repairs over the last three years. “Total, we didn’t spend half a million, but we may have been kind of flirting with it,” Wise said.

He added that the three-year renovation budget really benefited from a the low bid made by new Ozark County company Comsec Consulting in 2022 to retrofit the jail with new security, wiring, cameras, computer servers and other infrastructure. He said it was their first big job. 

“They didn’t do it for nothing, but it was very deeply discounted. It was kind of like those spec houses that people build as an example, so future customers can go look and see their work,” Wise said. “That’s kind of what the Ozark County Jail was for them. They probably did $400,000 worth of work, and we only paid a little over $170,000,” Wise said. 

The jail also received a new roof, which cost $60,000, and several other upgrades. 

Assessor’s office stays much the same for 2025

The Ozark County Assessor’s office budget doesn’t have any major changes, Wise said. “She has a few people working for her in that office, so it looks like the only change is really the raises.”

The fund had a starting balance of $38,600 and anticipates revenues of $214,000 to come in throughout 2025. The assessor’s budget is set at $216,600 in spending. In 2024, the assessor’s office spent $202,600 of its budget. 

Ozark County road and bridge hopeful for FEMA funds but not counting on it

The last major funds in the county budget are those of the Ozark County Road and Bridge fund, separated into the east and west districts. The fund involves the operation of the road and bridge crews, which fix and maintain Ozark County’s county roads and county road bridges. 

“There is very little that ever really changes in road and bridge. The [pay] raises are absolutely going to be there, but that’s about it,” he said. Wise said that newly elected Eastern District Commissioner Jim Britt worked with Western District Commissioner Layne Nance to craft his budget this year, and he did a really good job. 

The road and bridge crews began the year with a balance of $200,500 in the west and $365,000 in the east. 

The county anticipates revenue for both districts combined to come in somewhere near $2 million, which is comprised of $330,000 in expected property tax revenue, paired with $511,000 in sales tax, $296,000 from grants and other intergovernmental revenue and $800,000 from the County Aid Road Trust (CART) funds, which comes from state motor fuel taxes.

One area of revenue that the county is hopeful for is funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). They have not budgeted any funding for 2025, because even though they’ve been working tirelessly with the organization to submit paperwork for the flood last November that caused an enormous amount of damage to county roads and bridges, they say they can’t really count on the money.

“We just have no clue when it’s going to come in. The way it works is that we have to spend all the money [to fix the damaged roads and bridges], and then they reimburse us. We’ve seen FEMA projects start in one year, and it was 18 months later before we got a check,” Wise said. “Because of that, there are some counties that can’t even afford to have a FEMA project. Even for us, with the 2017 flood, if [former Eastern District Commissioner] Gary [Collins] hadn’t had money left over from the year before, there was no way we could have done the repairs we did for the FEMA project. It would have been impossible. I forgot how many hundreds of tons of rock were moved, but it was crazy.”

The budget allows for $2.3 million in spending for road and bridge crews. Last year, the county spent $2 million repairing county roads and bridges. The spending involves employee wages, equipment and graders, fuel, parts and repairs for the graders, road supplies including rock, asphalt, concrete, hot mix, steel and other various things. 

The smaller funds and how they pad the budget

The other two dozen or so funds are generally formed so that various types of payments, which sometimes have strict laws on how they can be used, can be received and spent. Those funds are under the complete jurisdiction of the officeholder who creates the fund, Wise said. 

“If you don’t budget it, it can’t be used. So the budgeted amount of money is always, always, always going to look higher than what we will even dream of spending,” Wise said. “Some of these little funds have $500. Some of them have $50,000, $75,000, $85,000… The extreme vast majority of our little funds can only be used for exact things. So, the law enforcement restitution fund can only be used for say, jail purposes. We couldn’t use the law enforcement restitution fund for ammo or gasoline or things like that.”

Wise says he urges officeholders to budget for those amounts if they expect revenue to come in for them. 

“If you start out with a $0 balance and you’re going to have $500 come into that fund, budget $500 going out rather than jumping through all the hoops we have to in order to change it. We can change it - and we do sometimes, but it’s just better to budget it. That way it’s there if you need it, and you can just cut a check if you need to.”

Wise says that makes the total bottom line of the budget look significantly more than the actual spending will ever amount to. 

“If people only look at the budgeted amount, and go ‘whoa.’ Then don’t look at what we actually spent when the year’s over, they’re not doing any good. They aren’t looking at any real numbers. They are just a crystal ball… the best guess we could possibly come up with. We can’t see the future, but what we can do is prepare for it in the ways that we can. And that pads the budget by it’s a lot - hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Wise said another fund that has been made is the opioid settlement fund, which involves money that the county receives as a result of a nationwide settlement involving damages caused by overprescribed opioids. 

“They sent us $15,000 one year and then $60,000, but they have us so bound on what we can actually spend it on. We’re going to get this money for 17 years. We don’t know how much is going to come in each year. It’s going to go up and down, but if it keeps going up, we’ll easily get to the point where we’re just sitting on this money, and we just can’t spend it legally. We’ll just run out of ways to spend it,” he said. 

In addition to the law enforcement restitution fund and the opioid settlement fund, the smaller funds included in the 2025 budget are: a special road and bridge fund, law enforcement training fund, prosecuting attorney training fund, post commission, bad check fund, circuit clerk interest, law library, recorder user fee, election services, local emergency planning committee, tax maintenance fund, sheriff revolving, civil fee fund, CDV fund, 10% PA, time payment, HAVA fund, title III fund, inmate security fund, garnishment fund, ARPA fund, local assistance and tribal consistency fund and juvenile justice fund. 

Find out more

To find out more about the county budget or to ask any questions, contact the Ozark County Clerk’s office at 417-679-3516 or ozark.county@sos.mo.gov.

This week’s edition also includes the financial statement for the county in 2024, which outlines all of the county’s spending last year. See pages B1-B5 for that information.