Tuesday, the DuPage County Board approved a $625 million 2024 fiscal year budget utilizing the roughly $18.9 million surplus expected to be left over by the end of the year.
Spending on the 2024 budget increased by approximately $13.3 million since DuPage County Board Chair Deborah Conroy first proposed a $611.7 million budget in September.
The millions of increased expenditure were due to changes in county employee health insurance rates, adjustments to salary lines and an increase to the DuPage Care Center budget, DuPage County Deputy Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Sinn said in an interview.
According to documents provided by the county, property and sales tax rates in DuPage were left untouched this year despite the additional expenses.
“There was room in our existing revenues to meet those needs,” DuPage County Chief Financial Officer Jeff Martynowicz said. “As we go through the process, sometimes those things come up.”
The approved 2024 budget shows a 7% increase in spending over last year, but shows lower overall expenditure than the budgetary heights of 2020 and 2021 when the county’s spending ballooned to over $650 million.
Before the 2020’s DuPage County’s budgetary funds hovered around $450 million, but following the COVID-19 pandemic the 2020 fiscal year budget increased by more than 37%.
Despite the increase in spending, tax rates in DuPage remained relatively untouched, the property tax rate remained below 3% and sales tax remained stagnant.
The budgetary hole that would have resulted from the county’s opposition to tax hikes would end up being primarily filled by federal and state funds.
Before the pandemic, the county’s 2020 revenues lists intergovernmental sources accounting for about $50 million or 10.5% of all revenue; for the 2024 budget intergovernmental sources account for nearly $111.6 million or roughly 21.7% of all revenue.
A large chunk of intergovernmental funding was provided by the federal government through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) as a way to help local governments weather the impacts of the pandemic.
“This is a very fiscally responsible budget that we’re very proud of,” Conroy said in an interview. “I think we’ve used the ARPA funds very responsibly so that we can provide the most effective services for our community members.”
The federal government requires ARPA funds be allocated by 2024 with an extension until 2026. DuPage County for its part has planned to allocate these funds gradually over the next three years to alleviate food insecurity, Martynowicz said.
“We’re showing that you can be fiscally responsible and balance your budget, and make sure that you do what’s important so that you can on that trajectory in the future,” Conroy said.
