Pasco County Administrator Dan Biles said the county is working through how it will respond to negative economic effects caused by coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19).
“We’ve had a pretty tremendous revenue impact to us — across several different funds. We are working through now, how we are going to make sure that we still stay solvent through the rest of the fiscal year, in light of the revenue impact,” Biles said, during an April 24 virtual town hall meeting hosted by Pasco County Commissioner Kathryn Starkey.
Those decreased revenues “will impact things across the general fund — which are libraries, parks, the transport piece of our rescue, and some of the other general services we provide.
“We’ve not yet seen a downtick in building permits, but we also haven’t seen the April data yet. March was a strong month for building permits, but we haven’t seen April, and I’m not sure how much March was just on cruise control,” Biles said.
“We don’t have data yet on impact to sales tax, although we have some very obvious indications where those are going, but we obviously haven’t seen the revenue impacts yet,” he said.
Biles’ comments came after previous remarks he made during the Pasco County Commission’s first virtual board meeting on April 21. At that meeting, he indicated the county was being smart about not hiring for every vacancy and evaluating how to proceed with spending.
Biles said “furloughing or laying off people” would be last on his list.
The administrator also noted that even when things start opening up again, the county will continue to feel the effects of the pandemic for some time.
“We aren’t going to be past the impacts of COVID-19 any time soon, because there still is work to be done in treatment, and work to be done in vaccines, so it probably won’t be resolved for quite a while,” he said.
The county will need to continue to observe guidance from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, he added.
“Even if we do open up, that doesn’t mean that the risk is not there,” Biles said.
Published May 06, 2020
