Fuel cost

Fuel costs are a major concern for area counties as budgets are being set for the 2006 fiscal year.

Cape Girardeau County Auditor David Ludwig said the highway and sheriff departments are factoring a 35 percent increase for their fuel budgets.

For the highway department in 2005, a $135,359 fuel budget was set. And for 2006, the highway department's fuel budget has been increased to $155,000.

"Fuel is just a major expenditure," Ludwig said. "The price of what fuel is going to be next year is something that can be hard to predict."

For instance, last year when Cape Girardeau County was preparing its fuel budget, it based the budget on the price for a gallon of gasoline costing $1.60. Then prices went above $2 per gallon in the spring and skyrocketed well over that after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

"It's very difficult to predict the fuel budgets," said Wayne Whitener, Bollinger County associate commissioner. "We don't have any idea about what catastrophe could possibly happen, like the hurricane this year."

Whitener said Bollinger County won't prepare its budget until the end of December, but he's also expecting to increase fuel budgets.

"I don't think there is any doubt we will have to budget more," he said. "To the best of my recollection we based the 2005 fuel budget to have a slight increase over the previous year, but then look how high the gas prices got."

At the beginning of the month, Bollinger County's highway department had already spent $85,000 on fuel, the budget was set at $83,000. And the sheriff's department had used up $22,900 from a set budget of $20,000.

Scott County ran into the same problem, the sheriff and highway departments' fuel budgets were gone with three months left in the fiscal year.

"We had raised the fuel budgets some for 2005," Scott County Presiding Commissioner Martin Priggel said. "We thought it was going to be enough but it wasn't. These things are just really hard to predict."

Priggel said his county will be preparing the 2006 budget sometime in January. He also expects to increase the fuel budget.

"It's going to affect everything," he said of the fuel budgets. "It's going to make a lot of things more expensive. It will affect the mileage we pay the county employees for using their own vehicles, we will have to pay them more."

An increase of the price of natural gas is also a concern, Ludwig said.

"The utilities are going to cost a lot more," he said. "There's supposed to be an increase of 35 to 40 percent in the cost of natural gas."

Each county plans to conserve as much gas as possible in the upcoming year.

"We will try to make every trip count," Priggel said. "We'll have to look at things more closely now and make sure that every gallon used is not wasted."

jfreeze@semissourian.com