Centre County’s proposed 2025 budget includes no tax increase for 15th straight year
The Centre County Commissioners adopted the 2025 tentative county budget Tuesday, one that will not raise real estate taxes for the 15th straight year.
Commissioners Amber Concepcion, Steve Dershem and Mark Higgins unanimously voted to adopt the tentative county budget, which shows the property tax remaining the same at 7.84 mills, and a proposed operating budget of $118.5 million — a 4.8% increase from the 2024 budget.
“For the 225th year, Centre County Government will be adopting a budget on time, and for the 15th straight year in a row, Centre County will not be increasing property taxes or doing a reassessment,” Higgins said. “I want to acknowledge the existence of the over 100 partner agencies included in the budget, and of course, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the federal government who provide 39% of county funding.”
According to a budget presentation given by Richard Killian, the county’s director of budget and finance, the largest expenditure in the budget is personnel costs, which sits at $45.8 million, or 39%.
Contracted services makes up the next-largest portion of expenditures with 34%, or $39.8 million; operations make up 13% with $15.5 million; and the remaining operating expenditures are debt service at 5%, internal charges at 4%, capital items at 3% and transfers at 2%.
The county’s proposed 2025 capital budget sits at $16.5 million, which is $12.1 million less than 2024’s capital budget. The decrease is due to the completion of major capital projects including the retaining wall at the courthouse, along with progress on other projects like the Centre Crest renovation.
The proposed budget’s estimated revenue for 2025 is $116.3 million, a 3.7% increase from 2024.
Federal and state grants account for most of the revenue at 39%, or $46 million; real estate taxes and department earnings at 26%, or $30.4 million; and department earnings at 19%, or $21 million.
The remaining 17% of the revenue is broken up into two sections — internal services and transfers, which makes up 15%, and interest earnings and rent, which makes up 2%.
The 2025 proposed budget also includes the use of $2.2 million in general fund reserves.
While the budget is mostly complete, there are still areas that haven’t been touched on, like salary increases for non-union employees. According to Dershem, this is due to necessary elections meetings taking the place of budget meetings.
“One of the things that we got hit with this year, unfortunately, is that election season lasted a little longer than we were anticipating, which exhausted a lot of our time over the past couple of weeks,” Dershem said. “We do have some cleanup work to do — not anything major. ... We will fine-tune it, we have 20 days to do that and we look forward to cleaning this up and having a budget ready for 2025.”
The county will advertise the proposed budget for a 20-day public inspection period, and according to Tuesday’s meeting agenda, the county’s final 2025 budget is expected to be adopted on Dec. 31.
Several local municipalities across the Centre Region, including State College Borough, have proposed 2025 budgets that include tax increases.