In a narrow 3-2 decision, the Park County Commission has decided not to raise employee wages at this time.

The three commissioners who opposed the raises — Commission Chairman Tim French, Commissioner Loren Grosskopf and Commissioner Lee Livingston — said they’d like to revisit the topic after November’s election.

Talking with various private businesses, “I’m not seeing a lot of raises,” Livingston said. “A lot of folks are doing what I think we’re recommending — (which) is just hunkering down and seeing what shakes out in November. It might be a whole different ballgame one way or the other.”

Commissioner Joe Tilden, along with Commissioner Bucky Hall, each voted to hike the pay of about 25 employees who’d been recommended for raises by their supervisors. The proposed changes would have also added a position back to the clerk's office, which had eliminated a position earlier this year, starting in January. The total cost for the full proposal (including the corresponding change in benefits) would have come to around $151,500 a year.

“Our employees are the best asset we have at the county and since I’ve been a commissioner, we have not done a lot for our employees,” Tilden said in advocating for the raises.

Commissioners approved roughly 2 percent raises for all employees in 2013 and has not done across-the-board hikes since then. Dozens of employees have received bigger bumps over the past three years at the recommendation of their supervisors.

Hall said the staffers being recommended for raises this year appeared to generally be people who hadn’t been

recommended in the past because of tighter budgets. Echoing Hall’s reasoning, Tilden suggested the commission approve those employees’ pay bumps now “because they’re not going to be rewarded for a long time.”

Commissioners suspect the county budget will be tight for the foreseeable future. The value of the oil and gas produced in Park County dropped by almost 50 percent last year and it dipped again in the first three months of 2016, said Assessor Pat Meyer. It means the county will collect about $2.75 million fewer property taxes for this year’s budget.

Commissioners thought this budget would be tougher to construct than it was. They’d suspected the budget would have to be balanced by tapping into the county’s $16.5 million reserve account, but it now appears they may end up with a surplus.

If the federal government continues to provide the same payments to the county that it has in the recent past (around $1.9 million), the county could run a nearly half-million surplus between July 1 and June 30, 2017. On the other hand, if that Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILT) and Secure Rural Schools (SRS) funding is not provided by Congress, the county could find itself with a significant deficit.

“After the election, we might have a better feel for what’s going to happen in Washington with SRS and PILT — because if we lose those two things, it would be much more ugly than this,” Grosskopf said, pushing to revisit the wages in roughly six months; French called the federal funding a “horrible unknown.”

He had wanted to approve one raise — to equalize the pay between the foremen of the Powell and Cody road and bridge shops — but his fellow commissioners generally balked at considering the two dozen requests individually.

Grosskopf said he didn’t want to go through the list and decide which had a higher priority, while Tilden recommended doing “all or none.”

The commissioners are giving one substantial raise to the county’s head of information technology, but that’s only to ensure he receives the retirement benefits he was promised many years ago, commissioners said.

Park County’s elected officials — outside of commissioners, whose wages are staying flat — and their first deputies will receive 1 to 1.3 percent raises based on a salary schedule set in 2014.

At the commission’s direction, each county department trimmed its non-personnel expenses by at least 5 percent to get this year’s budget to balance.

The final draft of the county budget will be formally presented to the public at a 7 p.m. hearing on Monday at the Park County Courthouse. It calls for a general fund budget of $23.2 million, down from $25.5 million a year ago.

Editor's note: This version corrects the total cost of the raises rejected by the county by subtracting the one raise that was approved and clarifies that an additional employee was among the requests.