"Where Olmsted County News Comes First"

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County chief financial officer Bob Bendzick gave a report of the county’s financial status to the board of commissioners following the state audit, which gave Olmsted County a clean bill of financial health. The state audit gave the county a clean rating. Olmsted County continues to maintain the AAA bond rating awarded by Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s credit rating agencies.

This year, the county operations are less than $500,000 over budget, which is less than three-tenths of a percent over the $165 million slotted for the 2012 operating budget, due largely to losses in waste management.

“Obviously, I’d prefer to see a surplus than a loss, but I think we did very, very well,” said Bendzick.

Bendzick is cognizant that a half million dollars is not anything less than a staggering amount to the average county resident, much more so the total budget that the loss is a sliver of.

To remedy this, the county has made a “quick statement” available on its website, www.co.olmsted.mn.us. This statement breaks down the cost for services provided by the county per resident. The statement is typically created yearly, but Bendzick chose to pull it out of the half-inch thick document so that the information can reasonably be visualized by an average county resident.

“We’re trying to get this information out in a way that makes sense,” said Bendzick.

An average of $1067 per county resident were paid to the county through property taxes this year. Further broken down, human services, including social service programs and public health, is the county’s largest cost at $446 per resident this year. The average county resident will pay $242 for criminal justice and public safety services this year, while highway construction and maintenance cost the same taxpayer $186.

“When you go to Target, you don’t think about going to a $4 billion corporation and get overwhelmed, you look at the prices of the items on the shelves,” said Bendzick. “When people see that the county has a 165 million dollar budget, they think ‘what you do is pretty expensive.’ When you’re paying money and you don’t know what it’s going for, this causes a lot of resentment. I think that this puts it in perspective.”

To illustrate this, Bendzick noted that a person would be hard pressed to pay someone to plow their driveway through the winter for the amount that they pay to plow the roads.

Olmsted County will break a string of years in which infrastructure depreciated more than the money put in to improve it, while this is a positive development, this remains an area of unease.

“It’s been a continuing concern about whether we’re able to keep up with that part of our job,” said Bendzick, noting that throughout recent years investment in infrastructure has not kept up with the county’s growing population, a situation that is not ideal.