Pine Haven puts a hold on projects

Pine Haven Mayor John Cook speaks frankly about how Pine Haven is and will deal with the economical issues subsequent to the state’s significant revenue loss. According to Cook, the town has put a hold on all projects until after November, “until we find out if we get that one percent money,” referring to the sixth cent tax that will appear on the ballot.

The approval or disapproval of the sixth cent sales taxation will determine how the council proceeds with said projects, he says.

“Once we know we’ve got that money, we can go ahead and look at projects, but, right now, we don’t know how much money we are going to have for projects,” he says.

Cook says the town’s greatest and most consistent issues at this time revolve around the gravel roads.

“That’s our biggest problem in Pine Haven right now. Most of the little towns in the state of Wyoming has paved roads,” he says. “We’d like to have more street lights in town, too, but that’s way down the road, until we get roads where they need to be.”

These problems include dust, which overwhelms everything during the summer months. At this time, the town works to mitigate the dust, which costs money as well.

“We need to do something to help the people on those roads not only have better roads, but also have less dust, but we just don’t get enough allocation from the state without that one percent money, we just don’t have it in a little town like ours,” says Cook.

However, the question of the sixth cent tax funding is not the largest shadow on the horizon. According to the mayor, the town received a letter from the state in March that the direct distribution would be cut 30% this year.

“That’s when our budgetary process starts so we went to our budget and cut everything we could cut to start July 1,” he says.

The direct distribution is almost the entire budget for Pine Haven as with many other small communities within the state. The size of the direct distribution has already affected the budget, Cook says, and the town has adjusted.

“We don’t know yet how much they’re going to give us; we get gas tax, cigarette tax, lottery tax and property tax, we get a little bit there, but it’s pretty insignificant when you look at the whole budget. We’ve got to have that money to operate,” he says.

“Fortunately,” explains Cook, “for the last three years, we have cut our budget ten percent every year. That has built our reserve up to the point where we didn’t really have to cut any critical services. So right now, at least until November, we are in the position of just maintaining the services we have for the people of Pine Haven; it’s only been a month into the budgetary year, but so far, we’ve been able to do that. We’ve had water leaks and situations come up where we’ve had to fix stuff and we still have that money budgeted to do that.”

The self-imposed budget cuts Pine Haven has implemented over the last three years, according to Cook, “was basically trimming fat and looking at it and saying ‘next year, can we get away with a little less than we did this year. And that’s what it amounted to, trimming fat off.”

“One of the best things we did was reducing our maintenance people,” says the mayor. “We had two maintenance people, one of them decided to take another job and we looked at it and said well can we get away with one maintenance person full time and have two part-time. So now we have two part time-maintenance people who are paid about the same for salary as the person who quit, but we don’t have to spend the money on the benefits. That saved us a bunch of money which we then rolled into the budget. That’s the way we did it.”

The public works department maintains and has been replacing culverts and upgrading drainage over the couple of years and the mayor said that the money for those operations are in the budget. “We had stock piled a bunch of culverts so we have culverts we can put in, but a lot of it is just fixing the ends of the culverts that have gotten squished down. Those things we can do and we have a list of those projects and do them as we have time.” The town has also stockpiled new water meters in better financial times and is able to replace the older brass bottomed models as they wear out and begin to leak.

The mayor states that the town will “just going to have to cut, cut, cut” if time get worse in Wyoming. The enterprising accounts from water, sewer and garbage though, are the exception, “The people are paying for garbage, water and sewer every month so those services are going to stay there because they are the ones paying for them.”

Cook is candid about possible future cuts: “Whether or not we can continue to have the number of employees we have and that kind of thing? That would depend on how much money we actually wind up having. We don’t know that at this point.”