The 2019 fiscal year budget for Greene County Medical Center was approved by the Board of Trustees Wednesday.

The tax levy for the upcoming fiscal year will remain the same as the current fiscal year of $3.07 per $1,000 valuation. The general tax levy is already at its maximum rate of $0.27. However, when added in with the other areas the medical center can levy including: insurance, Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System (IPERS) and the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA), it adds up to 55-percent of the total tax asking allowable rate. Board member Bill Raney explains why the Board didn’t want to increase the overall tax levy.

“I think the Board is trying to be fiscally responsible. I think it’s just a feeling that we don’t want to subsidized too heavily by the taxpayers. We want to try and run the medical center fiscally as best as we can on our own. If we can kind of recover some of those bad debt losses through what we call our ‘charity care’ then the taxpayer is doing what we need from the taxpayers.”

Last year, the medical center increased the tax levy up to $3.07, after holding it under $3 for a decade. The medical center is projecting about $26.1 million in revenue and $29.6 million in expenses. While the medical center is once again projecting a deficit for the next fiscal year, Chief Financial Officer Mark VanderLinden says they continue to find ways to help improve the overall budget.

“We try to do everything we can each year to budget improvement from the prior year. We do a fairly good job of that. Obviously we employ strategies, sometimes we have setbacks sometimes we see successes. That’s the nature of the business. But we always try to improve and I think we’ve improved in a lot of areas over the past few years.”

The medical center uses only 9.4-percent of the total amount of county tax dollars.