WHITEHALL — Budget season in Trempealeau County opens the way it usually does: with a stack of department requests, a state-imposed ceiling on how much the county can raise, and a gap between the two that somebody on the finance committee will have to close.

Department heads must submit their 2027 requests to the finance office by the end of this month. The finance committee makes its first pass at the numbers the last week of August, public budget hearings begin Sept. 3 at the courthouse, and the full board is expected to adopt a budget in November.

The arithmetic starts with levy limits. State law generally holds a county’s property-tax levy increase to the percentage of net new construction — new homes, barns and commercial buildings added to the tax rolls. In a rural county where new construction runs modest in most years, that translates to an increase of a percent or two, while health insurance, fuel and road materials have climbed faster.

“The levy limit doesn’t care what diesel costs,” said county finance director Neil Okerlund. “We get whatever new construction gives us, and everything else has to fit inside that. Some years it fits. This is not shaping up to be one of those years.”

The levy limit doesn’t care what diesel costs. We get whatever new construction gives us, and everything else has to fit inside that.

Dale Okerlund, county finance director

Two items loom over the process. The first is the jail. The county has commissioned a feasibility study of the aging facility in Whitehall, weighing renovation against new construction and examining staffing costs, which have grown as corrections wages rise and recruiting stays difficult. The study’s findings are expected to land in the middle of budget deliberations, and even a preliminary recommendation could reshape the county’s long-term borrowing picture.

The second is roads. The highway department is preparing what is expected to be the largest single request of the season, driven in part by frost damage from this spring, when repeated freeze-thaw cycles broke up pavement on town and county roads across the coulees. Highway officials have signaled that deferring the work would only raise the eventual cost, an argument the board has heard before and not always heeded.

Okerlund said his office will present the committee with the full stack of requests and a projection of what the levy can bear. “My job is to show them the whole picture,” he said. “Their job is the hard part.”

The county has some tools beyond the levy — fees, fund balance, borrowing for capital projects — but each carries its own politics. Debt service for a jail project, for instance, sits outside the levy limit, which makes borrowing tempting and taxpayers wary.

The finance committee also meets July 21 on a separate matter, the credit-card audit that found 61 missing receipts, and members have suggested that tighter purchasing controls could be written into the budget process itself.

Residents can weigh in at the Sept. 3 hearings in Whitehall. Budget documents will be posted on the county website as requests are compiled, Okerlund said, “warts and all.”