The Bartholomew County Council has approved the county’s 2026 budget, after digging into reserve funds to pay $450,000 for health insurance for some employees where grant funding failed to cover the cost.
This year, the county had a total budget of $71,600,825 with a general fund of $38,419,882. For 2026, the county will have a budget of $68,697,904 with $39,384,554 in the general fund.
What money is not in the general fund is made up of state and federal grants to cover the county’s health department, court services and other departments.
Next year’s budget for the county is not as much as it was in 2025 because the county did not get as much funding from Health First Indiana, council members said.
“We also didn’t budget because of timing on some of the grant funds with court services,” said Pia O’Connor, Bartholomew County auditor. “We’ll have to revisit that when we know more about what their grant funding is.”
In Monday’s council meeting, council members learned court services does not have enough in its budget to cover the health insurance for 23 employees, Leah Beyer, council president, said. According to the figures, court services was $450,000 short in the health insurance category.
Grants could not cover all the costs of health insurance for 2026, so the county council had to look for other options to provide insurance for court service employees.
The council decided they will have the commissioners pay for it out of the commissioner reserve account, which is used for health care costs. However, the commissioners said they wanted to keep the reserve account as full and as close to $5 million as they could.
“We took the $450,000, that’s the cost to cover those 23 of the 34 grant employees… We just added a line item back in the budget,” Beyer said. “It’s almost like we’re doing a grant match to by providing this health insurance.”
The line item for the cost of the insurance is being added to the county general budget.
According to county officials, at this time the county’s property tax rate will increase to 0.41 per $100 assessed valuation as opposed to the current 0.37 per $100 assessed valuation.
“If your assessed value is the same on your home is the same as what it was before, your property taxes will probably go up slightly,” O’Connor said. “But since there have been so many changes, a person that has a homestead exemption on their home, we need to dig into the weeds more now that we have everything done and see what those effects are.”
