County begins budget planning next week

A series of budget meetings has been scheduled next week for Franklin County officeholders and department heads.

The purpose of the scheduled meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday is to discuss the needs of each office ahead of budget planning for the 2018-2019 fiscal year, which begins on Dec. 1.

"We're not going to pick on anybody, we're just going to try to work it out with everybody," said Finance Chairman Alan Price. "Everything is tight, especially with the state going over (budget). It doesn't look any better than what we got this year."

Meetings will begin at 9 a.m. Tuesday and continue through 3 p.m. Five officeholders/department heads will meet with the county board Wednesday, beginning at 8:30 a.m.

Treasurer Keith Jones reported the county's common account should maintain a balance of about $750,000 through September.

Reimbursement payments from the state for the detention center and probation services are current, he added.

The finance committee also heard a proposal from Erick Christy, president of Concepte of Illinois, Inc. to replace the county's existing financial and tax servers and to replace an existing data backup solution with a backup disaster recovery solution.

Christy said the existing financial server is 12 years old and is in need of replacement due to its age and security reasons. He said the server's operating system is past its end of life and Microsoft has stopped supporting it as well as providing security updates.

The tax server was purchased in 2009 and also needs to be replaced because of its age and security reasons, Christy said. Estimated prices for the servers were $10,864 and $19,194, respectively; and a quote of $4,525 was provided for the backup system.</group><group id="0C2AC6F4-BB13-4D5A-B93F-138E3C82D2BE" type="seoLabels"><seoLabels></seoLabels></group></idf></inlineXML></co