A proposed $36 million budget for Penobscot County, including a controversial increase in the jail budget, was partially approved by an advisory committee in a five-hour meeting on Tuesday before the meeting adjourned.
The overall budget, if approved, would set the stage for what could be substantial tax hikes for residents.
The committee will vote on more than a dozen cost centers on Dec. 11 at 5 p.m. Committee members are also able to reconsider previous votes.
Penobscot County Commissioners will have the final vote at a later meeting after the committee votes on the full budget.
Members of the 15-member Budget Advisory Committee questioned multiple increases and line items while trying to keep spending down because of the nearly 20% tax increase that the proposed amounts would hand down to residents.
The county’s budget has surged from 2025 as the Penobscot County Commissioners, Daniel Tremble, Andre Cushing and David Marshall, have hoped that state funding would fix a long-simmering funding crisis fueled by soaring jail costs and a revenue deficit. The ongoing shortfall has created a roughly $7 million deficit in the county’s undesignated fund balance that former Penobscot County Administrator Scott Adkins announced at the meeting.
The $7 million has been built up from costs across the county not being accounted for.
The 20% increase could be just the first step to resolve the equity deficit.
“It’s going to take a number of years to fix [the deficit], but we have to stop the bleeding first,” Adkins said
The deficit stems from a soaring jail budget that had a $3.4 million shortfall as of the end of 2024. The jail budget has grown since 2021 at an average deficit of $2.7 million a year and continues to rise due to health care and boarding costs as state funding has plateaued in the past five years, Cushing said.
The county budget totals more than $36 million, with more than $16 million of that coming from the jail. That’s up nearly $5 million from last year, with roughly $30 million to be raised through taxes.
Tremble and multiple committee members questioned why the jail’s funding issues have not been brought to them before despite it affecting taxpayers next year.
“This is the leech crushing our communities,” Brewer Mayor Jenn Morin said about the jail budget.
The jail’s funding has been brought to the committee every year but was not highlighted in previous years like it has been this year, Adkins said.
Multiple members of the committee cited how residents would feel the effects of the tax hike caused by the jail’s shortfall and sought to cut the budget in other areas, but the budget was passed with just $120,000 removed from the building improvement funding and a $111,500 reduction in donations for programs across the county.
Discussion on putting funding back into the budget for donations was tabled until the next meeting
The committee wasn’t “going to find a million dollars’ worth of savings” in department spending because the county had already made cuts to account for the jail’s deficit, Cushing said.
“The elephant in the room is the jail deficit,” Cushing said.
Excluding the jail, departmental budgets went up 4.3% compared to last year.
Commissioners and committee members talked about changes to the county’s fiscal year schedule which is offset from many communities’ calendars, sending out the budget and agenda to committee members earlier than the week before the meeting that they currently do and meeting more often about the budget, changes multiple committee members asked for.
Rep. Steven Foster, R-Dexter, spoke briefly about another possible change to the budget process in a proposed legislation that would see county budgets go to referendum vote for approval by residents.
The change to a county-wide vote may change the outcome of the process, Foster said.
“Taxpayers have had it in Maine,” Rep. Steven Foster, R-Dexter, said.
