Last week in talking about the budget County Director of Finance Kevan Bryan spent significant time talking about “an 800-pound gorilla that we can do little to control” – inflation.
At the current rate of inflation – 8.6 percent – over the next five years, Yellowstone County government will be running at almost a $9 million deficit to inflation.
After counting up all the revenue that will be available to the County in FY2022-23, it will be “coming in at less than half the rate of inflation for the upcoming year,” said Bryan.
Assuring that at the moment the county budget is sound, Bryan went on to explain his fears to the county commissioners. “As we have weathered the COVID pandemic about as well as we could have hoped, we now have another challenge that does not come with a stated expiration date either,” he said.
More than once during his almost seven years of setting budgets and calculating revenues and expenditures for the county, Bryan has expressed concerns about the potential impacts on county budgets should inflation ever get real.
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