The Greene County Board of Supervisors met yesterday in regular session.

The Board unanimously approved the 2015 fiscal year budget of $10,887,830 in revenues and $11,029,290 in expenditures.  The Supervisors set the tax levy for urban areas at $6.05 per $1,000 of property valuation and $9.20 for rural areas.

Chair John Muir believes the Board has done a good job over the past couple of years and especially this next fiscal year with keeping the tax levy low even though property valuations have increased.

“We’ve lowered it a little bit, not much, and (land) valuations went gone up so as far as people’s taxes, they aren’t going to see much of a change.  We think that what we’re doing with the Louis Dreyfus Funds and what we’ve done with the Local Options Sales (and Services) Tax money, we’re acting responsibly with the money that we’re taking in.”

The Supervisors also approved raising all county department heads salaries 3% for the 2015 fiscal year and lowering their rate to a 2% increase.  Muir comments that the Board felt it they were being paid well already for the job that they were elected to do for the county, but that they felt they needed a little bit of an increase to prevent them from going backwards on their salaries compared to the increasing rate of insurance for the next fiscal year.

In other business, the Board voted to deny 33 partials for the business tax credits.  It was reported that either businesses had applied after the January 15th deadline or that some were multi-residential housing which automatically doesn’t qualify for the tax credits.

They also set Monday, March 10th at 9am as the public hearing date for the county’s application for a Community Development Block Grant for Scranton Manufacturing.

During the committee reports, all Supervisors said they will be in attendance for this Thursday’s presentation by Wild Rose Jefferson, LLP at Prairie Meadows in Altoona for the proposed casino in Jefferson.