Continued: Scott County Board slices, dices and erases $1.7 million in '09 spending

Major road projects will be delayed. A big park will offer less to wintertime users. Library hours will be trimmed. Squad cars won't carry cameras. People wanting advice from agricultural extension agents will be asked to pay more.

Nibbles like those on Tuesday allowed the Scott County board to trim about $1.7 million from its budget for next year.

It took three hours of wrangling, much of it because lame-duck board chairman Bob Vogel, of Elko New Market, was displeased that most of his colleagues were unwilling to strike more deeply into what he described as amenities in order to maintain a more aggressive program of highway building and maintenance.

"Sometimes," he said, "you have to do without the ice cream because you don't have enough for dinner."

But other commissioners replied that the ramped-up road building to which he was referring was conceived in an era when Scott County was still one of the nation's fastest-growing counties. New construction today is but a sliver of what it was five years ago.

"Every year we're putting $4 million more into roads than we were four years ago," said commissioner Jon Ulrich, of Savage. "And we've pulled in $24 million from federal and other sources. I think we can feel pretty good about what we've done with roads."

Parks and other services are important as well, added commissioner Jerry Hennen of Shakopee. "We want to be a whole county. We don't want it to be 'Welcome to Scott County, the Land of Roads!' We're more than a road."

Overall, the board's aim has been to keep from raising taxes on the average-valued home. In a slowing growth phase, that meant cutting about $3 million from the budget, much of it done internally by senior managers in ways they say the public won't notice.

Among the details of the higher-profile cuts:

Roads: The county will, for at least this year, stop ramping up the roads program by another $1 million each year, as it has done for the past few years. That will delay plans such as the second phase of the County Road 12 project in Prior Lake, said Lezlie Vermillion, director of public works. Board members did, however, talk of perhaps doing more borrowing to pay for road work. Growing suburban counties sometimes find that more fair than a pay-as-you-go approach because borrowing transfers part of the cost to future residents, for whom road expansions are designed.

Parks: The county will drop plans to collect an extra $137,500 from taxpayers to accelerate its parks program. And it will pull back about $60,000 from Hennepin County's park service, which operates parts of its system. That will mean the winter closure of the visitor's center at Cleary Lake park, starting Nov. 1, 2009. Restrooms, concessions, ski lessons and rentals will cease. Ski trail grooming will go from daily to weekly. The park will remain open but unattended.

Libraries: A proposed cut of $50,000, which would have meant reducing library availability by about 10 hours per week, cutting summer programs and possibly creating longer waits for materials, was trimmed to $35,000. That will reduce the impact but not eliminate it. Board members backed away from larger cuts, believing that in a down economy, people look more to libraries.

Other agencies: An array of agencies and programs, from the county fair to the historical society, will see cuts of varied size. Many were represented in the room, and most seemed willing to absorb the cuts being discussed. Several recipients of special grants, none of them huge, were in line to be zeroed out altogether. But they included things like the Sexual Violence Center, and in the end commissioners chose to reduce their funding but not cut it completely. They seemed inclined to agree with colleague Joe Wagner, of Jordan, who observed:

"I don't want the press writing it up that we're taking away all of this. It makes us look like real meanies here."

David Peterson • 952-882-9023

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