Benton County’s $85,410 Year: Road Money Dominates the Budget
Commissioners proposed spending most of next year’s county budget on roads and bridges, with Kennewick’s district allotted $12,000 and an October hearing set on the tax levy.
To run all departments of the county government next year will require an expenditure of $85,410, according to the annual budget made up by the county commissioners last week. Of this total, $60,910 will be used in road and bridge building in the three districts.
Of the road fund the Kennewick district is allowed $12,000, the Prosser district $7,500 and the Hanford-White Bluffs-Kionana district $15,000. Included in the current expense budget is an appropriation of $2,000 for the office of county agriculturalist. Of this sum only $900 is for salary, the big end of it going for equipment, library, traveling and other expenses.
The commissioners will meet again October 5 for the purpose of hearing complaints against the budget and to fix the year’s tax levy. The list of the proposed expenditures is given in detail in another column of this issue.
“Of the road fund the Kennewick district is allowed $12,000, the Prosser district $7,500 and the Hanford-White Bluffs-Kionana district $15,000.”
Road and bridge budgets are the quiet machinery of local government, shaping which communities get paved and which wait. The 1914 allocations for Kennewick, Prosser and the Hanford reach echo today’s debates over rural infrastructure and county spending.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.