County commissioners discuss FY26 proposed budget

As they prepare for the new budget cycle, Stephens County Commissioners Court discussed the first draft version of the proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 at their latest meeting.

The county’s Chief Appraiser, Will Thompson, (no longer in training) presented the proposed budget at the commissioners court meeting Monday, July 28.

Thompson said that the county’s costs continue to increase, and one of their biggest challenges is health insurance.

“Since we got kicked out of the TML poll in 2023, we’ve had trouble securing insurance for our employees, and that cost continues to go up drastically,” Thompson said.

The budgeted cost for health insurance in the proposed budget is $13,719.60, an increase from $12,918.72 budgeted last year and the actual cost of $12,791.52 in 2024. The actual cost of health insurance in 2023 was $12,441.04.

“We’ve had some employment costs go up, trying to give small raises every year to our employees to keep them on board. They are pretty skilled labor; if you spend much time in our office, they get pretty highly specialized in their areas,” Thompson said. “The training is costly and timely so we try to keep them on board and stay with whatever the current rates are in the county. And we kind of look around at other jobs to try and keep them on hourly rates that manage that.”

Thompson also relayed the 2026 certified tax values to the court, which he said were about $20 million over the estimated values.

Locking in those values, the county is not seeing a change from last year’s certified values, allowing roughly an additional $300,000 in revenue. In the initial talks, the county had estimated about $108,000 in additional revenue.

If the county keeps the same tax rate, they would be able to get out of the red and be about $6,000 in the black.

There is an increase of $261,923.84 to the total expenditures in the general fund from the 2025 budget. The budget draft shows total general fund expenditures to be $5,491,758.53, up from $5,229,834.69.

There is a decrease in expenditures for each precinct shown on the budget draft. Precinct 1 shows budgeted expenditures going from $325,880.28 to $269,494.38.

Precinct 2’s expenditures are shown a slight decrease in the budget draft, going from $269,630.28 to $269,494.38. Precinct 3 also has a slight decrease from $269,630.28 to $269,494.38.

Precinct 4 shows a decrease of $56,385.90, going from $324,984.28 to $268,598.38.

“Real property made 78.7% of their value last year; last year it was 76.3%, so that was an increase,” Thompson said. “But minerals went from 11.3% of their value last year to this year, they’ve made up 9.2% of their total value. So minerals continue to decline. I think that’s important to realize, considering in 2010, minerals made up about 60% of their value in Stephens County. So that’s a big shift, it’s [usually] somewhere between 10% and 12%.”

Thompson also noted a change in the tax exemptions for business personal property, a legislative action that took place this year, which will need to be addressed by the county next year.

“Personal property has a current exemption of $2,500 – anything less than that is exempt from tax. That got increased, by voter rule in November, to $125,000,” Thompson said. “Seems like a really big jump, it is a really big jump. So what that does to us, we cover about 780 parcels right now that are considered business personal property or industrial property…That will drop to about 110 from that 780 that we’ll have to look at, but it only drops about $20 million in value.”

Thompson said that change will change the way they look at BPP and it will be under a more collective umbrella.

“So if you own a business, it’s at the same location and same address, but if you have business name for your vehicles, a business name for your equipment and a business name to do business under, all that is considered one account even though they are reported as three,” Thompson said. “So for the management of the $125,000, that’s a conglomerate, it’s not an individual.”

Thompson said that the county will have to get more diligent on businesses that are more than $125,000 to see if they are over the mark or under. He said that there will be a large impact to the school, especially regarding homestead laws that have passed, with the homestead exemption for school district property increasing from $100,000 to $140,000.

“On the school side, we’ll have about 890 homesteads that won’t pay any school tax and property tax,” Thompson said.

Following the initial discussions on the budget, the commissioners will be having budget workshops each Monday in August and September, except Labor Day, Sept. 1, until they adopt the budget.