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The Houghton County Board of Commissioners will have a slight surplus in the 2018-19 budget they passed Tuesday.
The general fund is budgeted to receive revenues of about $9.8 million, with 54.5% coming from property taxes. The rest of the revenue is made up of revenue sharing and other state sources and from charges from services.
Expenditures for the year are also budgeted at about $9.8 million, with county wages and benefits counting for about two-thirds of the overall budget.
The projected budget surplus is $15,951.
County Administrator Eric Forsberg said Houghton County has had the lowest property taxes per capita of any county in the Upper Peninsula for years. He said the disparity may be due to the high number of college students that live in the area most of the year.
Forsberg compared Houghton to Chippewa County, the home of Lake Superior State University, which brings in more than $1.9 million in property taxes per year than Houghton County.
Forsberg said if the county took in the average amount of property taxes per capita, Houghton County could pay off its debt to MERS (Municipal Employees’ Retirement System) in three years and build a new jail in four.
He added that the county has been historically under assessed by a large amount.
