The Waldo County Budget Committee on Friday approved a spending plan that amounts to a roughly 16% increase over 2025.
The vote, which took place after more than an hour of public comment, brought to an end more than three months of tumultuous negotiations over the 2026 county budget.
“We’re between a rock and a hard place,” said Bob Kurek, the budget committee chair who said it would have been difficult to further reduce spending without cutting the services that people in the county are used to.
“Nobody here felt that cutting services was a responsible thing to do,” he said.
The 2026 budget total is about $14.8 million. Last year, the county budgeted $12.7 million but ended up overspending by roughly $1 million.
In mid-December, the Waldo County Commissioners proposed a budget that amounted to a 36% hike. Amid outrage from the public and local elected officials, the budget committee – whose nine members have final authority for approving the spending plan – opted not to vote and instead sent the commissioners back to the drawing board.
In the ensuing months, the commissioners proposed several versions of the spending plan, amid pressure to make ever deeper cuts. During that period, longtime commissioner Betty Johnson died and was replaced by Breanna Pinkham Bebb.
Commissioner Kevin Kelley has argued that the commission is “making up for the sins of the past” with its budget this year. Factors that helped inflate the budget include an expensive and unpredictable self-pay health insurance plan and union contracts spelling out wage and benefit increases that many argue are too generous but can’t be cut due to collective bargaining agreements.
The county is also behind on audits – the most recently completed one is for 2022 – in part because the county had several different finance directors in the span of a few years, each of whom used different accounting practices.
While some budget committee members wanted the 2026 budget to be less than 10% higher than the one from 2025, the commissioners warned that such deep reductions would present significant financial risk for the county and be unsustainable in the long term.
From Jan. 1 until now, the county has been operating on 80% of its 2025 budget. That has made it unable to fund raises that were already agreed upon, mostly through collective bargaining agreements. The county has already received several union grievances that will have to be arbitrated, Bebb wrote in a Facebook post explaining her support for the current budget.
Belfast Mayor Eric Sanders said that, under the new budget, the city stands to pay about $320,000 more to the county in 2026 than it did last year.
He said thinks the commissioners did “pretty well” cutting the budget under the current circumstances.
“It sucks, but it sucks less than it did,” Sanders said.
Sanders doesn’t blame the commissioners since they were not in office when many of the decisions shaping the county’s financial situation were made, he said. But now they must address the “two-headed” problem of union contracts with large wage increases and the self-insurance program, Sanders said.
“It’s not their fault,” he said. “However, they’re on the clock for next year’s budget.”
Speaking at the budget hearing, Jay Davis, a Belfast resident and former editor of The Republican Journal, said the budget process highlighted the need for Waldo County, the only county without a professional County Administrator, to hire one.
He also said that he hopes that the increased scrutiny the county government has faced during the budget process doesn’t let up.
“Hopefully the local press and the citizens who have attended the many budget committee meetings this winter will keep the pressure on our elected leaders,” he said. “No longer will county government be the forgotten player in our communal life, especially when we know what happens when nobody is watching.”
