Resolution 117-26

Sourcing. Every figure in this story comes from a Johnson County document: the FY2027 budget book and its presentation deck, the statutory revenue-neutral-rate notice, and the Board of County Commissioners’ own annotated agendas, all of which a reader can pull from the county’s budget page and its OnBase meeting portal. Where a number is this paper’s arithmetic on the county’s figures, it says so. Where a fact rests on another newsroom’s reporting, it is credited to that newsroom. Copies of every document are held by this paper.

Johnson County commissioners adopted the county’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget at their 9:30 a.m. business session Thursday, passing Resolution No. 117-26, “adopting the Fiscal Year 2027 Budget and FY 2027-2031 Capital Improvement Program,” as item 6 on an agenda that also carried the budgets of three separate fire districts and a set of Civil Service Board bylaws.

It took three motions, not one. The annotated agenda records Commissioner Jeff Meyers moving each and Commissioner Shirley Allenbrand seconding each, one for every taxing district the board sets a budget for: the County Taxing District, at $1,126,931,768 in expenditures and $308,979,758 of the 2026 ad valorem tax, carrying with it a Wastewater budget of $548,671,712 and the recommended FY2027–2031 Capital Improvement Program; the Park and Recreation Taxing District, at $151,161,592 and $54,020,450; and the Library Taxing District, at $84,278,709 and $55,695,002. Each of the three passed 6-1-0. All seven commissioners were present. The record shows no amendment offered from the floor.

Those four expenditure figures add up to $1,911,043,781, the published total, to the dollar. Whatever else Thursday morning did, it did not move the number.

The board voted to publish that figure on July 16 by 5-1-0, with Commissioner Janeé Hanzlick absent. On Thursday the full board was in the room.

That total is larger than what the county actually spends, and the county’s own notice says so: $96,847,364 of it is interfund transfers, money the county moves from one of its own funds to another, counted once on each side. The statutory total also includes reserves. The county’s own framing of the same budget, as reported at the August hearing, is roughly $1.378 billion in expenditures against $532.9 million in reserves.

What it costs a Johnson County property owner

The estimated levy is 24.119 mills (17.283 for the county, 3.815 for the library, 3.021 for parks) against an assessed valuation of $17,877,883,097, up 4.98 percent from $17,029,840,034 the year before.

Measured against the three revenue-neutral rates the county formally noticed its intent to exceed, that levy raises roughly $19.8 million more in property tax than revenue-neutral would have. That figure is this paper’s arithmetic from the statutory notice; KSHB 41 independently quotes county officials at the same number, which is the kind of agreement worth saying out loud.

On August 25, at a hearing at the Olathe Conference Center that drew about 175 people and 36 speakers, the board passed the three rate resolutions (112-26 for the county district at 16.470 mills, 113-26 for parks at 2.880, and 114-26 for the library at 3.627), 6-1-0 each, moved by Hanzlick and seconded by Commissioner Jeff Meyers. The annotated agenda records the tally and does not name the dissenter. The Johnson County Post and KSHB 41 both name Commissioner Michael Ashcraft, and this paper credits them for it rather than claiming the record says so.

One more number is coming that is not in Thursday’s vote: the clerk certifies the final levy in the fall, once valuation is final. The county’s budget director has said publicly the rate will likely be adjusted upward, to 24.130.

The 2028 column

Johnson County holds a AAA rating and a large General Fund. It also has three different reserve targets in one budget document: board policy sets 20 to 25 percent of General Fund net revenues, management states a target of 28 percent, and the book itself notes that Moody’s “ratings criteria base formula calls for 30 percent General Fund Reserves for local governments with AAA ratings.”

Against the 28 percent target, the county’s FY2027 projection is 28.4 percent: unrestricted General Fund of $136,451,887, after $65.7 million in restrictions. Then the county’s own projection continues: 27.7 percent in 2028, 26.5 in 2029, 25.5 in 2030, 24.5 in 2031.

The management target is breached in the county’s own next-year column, printed in the budget book, in a table that goes out to 2031. Nothing here is hidden; it is on page D-7. It is simply not the number anyone says out loud.

The same deck, having worked through restrictions, working capital of $86.6 million, contingencies of $2.375 million, prior public-safety sales tax obligations of $23.2 million, and the 28 percent floor itself, arrives at a line reading “Remaining Unrestricted $1,771,610”, then adds $7 million in estimated 2026 vacancy savings to reach $8.77 million. On a $1.9 billion budget, the genuinely uncommitted balance the county shows itself, before counting money it expects to save by not filling jobs, is under $1.8 million.

The cliff in March

Public Safety Sales Tax III is a quarter-cent, approved by voters on November 1, 2016, effective April 1, 2017. It sunsets March 31, 2027, five months into the fiscal year Thursday’s resolution funds.

In December 2025, a Shawnee County District Court judge ruled the county could not put a PSST III renewal on the ballot for the uses it proposed (Med-Act, the sheriff, the district attorney, mental-health crisis response, body cameras, dispatch, and re-entry), reading K.S.A. 12-187 to permit law-enforcement facilities only. The county withdrew the resolution the following Thursday.

Meanwhile the reserves that tax has already built are being spent. The FY2027 budget commits $10.2 million of PSST III reserves for what the book calls “start-up costs associated with the new Health Services Building, and other capital and one-time expenditures.”

The 2016 ballot funded a courthouse and a medical examiner facility. A court has now read the enabling statute’s “public safety” narrowly. Whether spending reserves already collected is governed by that reading at all is a different question from whether the tax can be extended, and this paper does not have an answer to it. It is recorded here as a question for the county’s legal department, and it is on the request ledger below, because it is exactly the kind of question a budget adopts silently.

Whether any of that was said out loud Thursday morning, the record does not show. The annotated agenda prints motions, seconds and tallies; it does not print discussion. The county broadcasts the session live and posts it to YouTube, and the approved minutes will carry more. This paper has read neither, and says so rather than reporting silence as absence.

Three fire districts, and one of them was different

Ahead of its own budget the board adopted three fire district budgets, and they did not all land the same way.

Resolution 096-26, for Northwest Consolidated Fire District, passed 6-1-0, moved by Allenbrand and seconded by Meyers. Resolution 097-26, for Consolidated Fire District No. 2, passed 6-1-0 on the same mover and second. Resolution 098-26, for Johnson County Consolidated Fire District No. 1, whose proposed budget was published in July at $25,576,344, passed 7-0-0, moved by Commissioner Julie Brewer and seconded by Allenbrand.

Two 6-1-0s and a 7-0-0, on three consecutive items of the same kind, from a board with all seven members in the room. The revised Civil Service Board bylaws, item 2, also passed 7-0-0. The record carries the counts and no explanation of the difference, and this paper is not going to supply one.

What the record does not say

• Who voted no, on anything. Thursday’s annotated agenda records a 6-1-0 tally on each of the three budget motions and on two of the three fire district resolutions, with all seven commissioners present and named present at the top of the page. It does not name a dissenter on any of them. The county’s annotated agendas print the count and not the names. Video and approved minutes carry the names, and the minutes lag.
• Resolutions 115-26 and 116-26 appear on no agenda this paper has read. They are likely administrative, or from the August 20 session. That is a question, not a finding.
• No vendor is named in the Capital Improvement Program section. Vendors surface only later, as awards. None rode Thursday’s consent agenda, which held exactly one item: approval of the August 13 business session minutes, passed 7-0-0. No contract award of any size was on it.
• What the Committee of the Whole did at 10:30 a.m. It met the same morning on a single item, a County Transit Fund update. Its annotated summary had not posted as of 2 p.m. Thursday, so whether anything there bears on the budget adopted an hour earlier is not yet answerable from the record.
• Candidate campaign-finance filings received on or after April 22, 2026 are no longer posted by the county election office; they are available by open-records request only. Four commission seats are on the November 3 ballot, including the chairmanship. The board that adopts this budget is partly the board that stands for election eight weeks later, and the money behind those campaigns is currently a request, not a web page.

The request ledger

These are Kansas Open Records Act requests. None has been sent. Every day count is blank rather than zero for that reason, and the column only moves one way once it starts.