Also holding a special meeting Tuesday will be the Lake County Commission, which needs to pull over a half-million dollars from reserves to cover next year’s expenses:
The provisional budget the commissioners had approved, included a 3% wage increase for county employees. After seeing the budget shortfall, commissioners indicated they would like to see a budget with only a 2% increase. However, even that reduction will not be enough to eliminate the use of reserve funds to cover the budget.
…The County will approve a final budget during a special meeting on September 23rd [“County Looks to Fill $500,000 Shortfall,” KJAM Radio, retrieved 2025.09.19].
State can’t build a prison without raiding reserves; Lake County can’t plow the roads without tapping the snowy-day funds.
Lake County would be dipping more deeply into its reserves—or nixing those pay raises altogether—if it hadn’t enacted a new road and bridge levy back in June. Lake County expects the additional 0.06% property tax (that’s $420 on a $700K house, and $700K is roughly the median asking price of the 37 home listings I find around Lake Madison on Zillow this morning) to bring in $1,415,031 in 2026, By law, the county has to hand 25% of the proceeds to the municipalities, leaving Lake County with $1,061,273 from the new tax to spend on roads and bridges connecting those nice lake homes with Madison, Chester, and the great wide world beyond.
The County may have to think about what they are doing now because , the highway department is at an all time low for employees were has there wages went? And the road Levy of that passes is all the money staying in the highway department? More then likely what the county get for the Levy they will cut the highway departments budget to place some were else.
SDCL 10-12-13 says, “Money in the fund may be expended in the laying out, marking, maintaining, constructing, and reconstructing roads and maintaining, constructing, and reconstructing bridges, under the jurisdiction of the board of county commissioners.” The county can put leftover/unexpected money from the levy into a highway and bridge reserve fund, but SDCL 10-12-16 forbids reverting that money to the general fund. I would thus think that if the county levied $1.1M in dedicated road tax but then shifted $1.1M from the highway budget to another county budget line, there’d be trouble.