Commissioners approve county, UMC budgets and tax rates

El Paso County Commissioners have put their stamp of approval on some of the budgets and tax rates that will affect county taxpayers the coming year.

Commissioners unanimously approved the county’s tax rate, which is identical to fiscal year 2016. They heard from the leadership of the County Hospital District, also known as University Medical Center before approving that tax rate and budget, which are increasing over last year.

UMC is looking at a $611 million budget for the 2017 fiscal year and a tax rate of $0.234456 cents per $100 of home value. That’s one millionth of a cent – or 0.000001 less – than the originally proposed rollback tax rate, which is the maximum taxes can be increased before triggering the potential for an election on the issue.

That’s a 5.3 percent increase over last year’s rate. So for the average El Paso County home valued at $123,000, that comes out to $290.08, or about a $17 tax increase a year.

Even with that tax rate increase, UMC is facing expected expenses of $629 million next year, leading to an $18 million shortfall. Commissioners and hospital officials blame decreases in government medical reimbursements and uncompensated care for the decrease in revenue.

“The challenges for me is to really get to know the operations in a little more detail,” said UMC CEO Jacob Cintron, who has been in the position since late July.

He added, “and to look to see where we could continue to provide the same level of service or even better but to do so perhaps more efficiently so that we’re able to not only maintain the level of service our community gets but to increase it and hopefully at a more economical rate.”

Both the tax rate and budget were approved in separate 4-1 votes, with Commissioner Vince Perez, (D) Precinct 3 voting against both times. He later said that concerns about how the tax rate was structured and how it could affect the long term revenues were behind his vote.

“The success of UMC is very critical, and we’ve made some critical investments in the hospital such as the clinics,” Perez said.

“There’s definitely attempts to make sure costs are as low as possible, to make sure we’re getting patients outpatient care instead of going to the emergency room. But how we manage that growth is very critical because we can’t just assume that taxpayers, local taxpayers are going to absorb 100 percent of what’s being lost on the medicaid supplemental side of things.”

In addition, commissioners approved the overall county tax rate of $0.452694 per $100 taxable property value in a unanimous vote. For that average county home, that comes out to $537.47 a year. Your individual taxes may vary depending on if your property value went up or down in the past year as well.

That is identical to last year’s rate, and below the effective tax rate of $0.456126 per $100 of property value. According to the county auditor, the proposed tax rate will bring in $1,334,152 less in revenue than the effective tax rate.

Commissioners also approved a strategic plan to keep the priorities they say got them to this point moving forward. County Judge Veronica Escobar (D) said that the plan now is to keep up the priorities and savings that make this possible.

“We are implementing through this budget the strategic plan that we approved in finality today. And the strategic plan is available online for the public’s review. It’s a very important way to plan for the future.”