Since the start of the health crisis, budgets have been a major topic in board meetings around the county.
Organizations are not expecting to be able to continue as they have in the past, and each is looking for ways to transition into a leaner time.
Gettysburg College
The college campus has been closed since March and classes are being taught remotely. Employees have been working from home.
A letter shared to the college community by President Robert W. Iuliano said the college has lost $7 million from the refund of room and board fees last academic year and will lose most of its income from summer camps and other programs.
Iuliano said beginning in July the college will be reducing its contributions to employees’ 403(b) plans from 10% to 5% of eligible compensation.
Iuliano said he, the college vice presidents, and the provost have voluntarily reduced their personal compensation through at least the first six months of the 2020-21 fiscal year.
“The college has committed to the full pay and benefits of our benefited employees until April 30. However, as of May 2, the college will be adjusting the pay with the actual working hours for those staff and administrative employees whose capacity to work effectively in this environment has been most profoundly affected,” said Iuliano.
“Hourly employees will continue to work at least one day a week (and many hourly employees more than that), while a small number of administrative employees will be furloughed. The affected employees have already been notified,” said Iuliano.
The college has not yet made a final decision about the format in which classes will be held in the fall.
Adams County Government
County Commissioner Marty Qually said the county’s budget was uncertain at the moment, but most of the difficulties will like occur next year.
“The picture in the future does not look very promising,” said Qually.
“We anticipate this year’s tax revenue will be lower than projected and next year’s will be lower than projected,” said Qually. “As far as additional expenses we anticipate the [Federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act] CARES act will cover a fair amount of those.”
Qually said the county’s revenues were hard to predict because the due date for April taxes has been extended and the county doesn’t yet know if it will be running low this year.
“Right now our tax director is researching the last recession to see if he can find any guidance on what percent of properties will be delinquent on taxes,” said Qually. “We need to know with state revenues dropping are they going to maintain the same level of funding through reimbursement to the county.”
“The good news is that Adams County has enough reserves to survive six months of zero revenue from the state,” said Qually. “It looks like these healthy reserves are going to come in handy, maybe not this year but probably next year.”
Destination Gettysburg
Destination Gettysburg, which is funded almost entirely by the county’s lodging (“pillow”) tax, began the year with a record increase in lodging demand before hitting an 85% decline in March and a further reduction in April and May.
“We acted very quickly in early March to reduce expenses, which included a furlough of over half our staff and salary cuts on those remaining,” said organization President Norris Flowers.
Flowers said the situation was dire because spring is the period with lowest cash flow and the organization had committed to costly marketing and website developments.
“We continue to do as much marketing and promotion as possible with limited financial and personnel support,” said Flowers. “We developed and launched a three-phase Tourism Recovery Program to restore the over 5,000 [lost] tourism related jobs in Adams County and the $735 million dollars in [lost] economic impact to the County.”
Flowers said the organization has received a $150,000 loan from the Small Business Administration and a $100,000 donation from Adams County.
“Our staff will continue to work very hard to restore and increase the visitor levels to Gettysburg and Adams County and get our businesses back open and people back to work as soon as possibly safe to do so. Fortunately, the tourism industry should recover faster than others but this certainly will have lasting ramifications,” said Flowers.
GASD
Gettysburg Area School District (GASD) is creating its 2020-21 budget under the assumption that revenues will be lower next year.
It is possible the district will have some savings because spring classes moved to remote learning in April.
GASD Superintendent Jason Perrin has prepared a preliminary 2020-21 budget that includes a .75 percent tax increase. Perrin said the increase was necessary to meet commitments already made by the district and to avoid draining the reserve fund balance. The current proposal has eliminated three new positions that had been considered by the board.
At a recent meeting, a majority of the school board members said they would vote against the tax increase.
Gettysburg Borough
Gettysburg Finance Director Nicolette James said the Borough is expected to have a revenue loss in 2020 of over $1 million.
James estimated a 10 to 50 percent reduction in revenues across the borough’s different revenue sources. “April was pretty much zero revenue,” said James.
James said it was helpful that revenues had been up in the first part of the year before the virus hit and the reserve fund balance was healthy at that time. “We had a $1.7 million fund balance in May that is being used to pay the bills,” said James.
James said real estate and income taxes were expected to remain steady in 2020 but will be received later because of delayed due dates. James said there would be significantly less revenue from hotels and admissions taxes, fines, and parking.
James’ predictions indicated there would only be about $654,000 in the reserve fund balance by December, which would only be enough revenue for one or two months in 2021.
Our projected revenue is not sufficient to carry us through April 2021,” said Borough Manager Charles Gable. “Looking forward, we have to make some difficult decisions.”
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Charles (Chuck) Stangor is Gettysburg Connection's Owner, Publisher, and Editor in Chief. I would like to hear from you. Please contact me at cstangor@gettysburgconnection.org.