Carroll County’s fire and EMS department is coming in over budget for 2026. Still, the county also saw a slight bump in property tax revenue and expects $1.5 million to be left unspent in the Department of Public Works.
As the county enters the midpoint of the 2026 fiscal year — and prepares to craft its 2027 budget this winter — Budget Director Ted Zaleski presented a short outlook on this year’s budget, giving county officials a “heads up on what things might look like.”
Carroll’s fire and EMS services are expected to come in about $500,000 over budget, which Zaleski said is “considerably ahead of where we expect.” The department had budgeted $35.2 million for FY 2026, which lasts from July 2025 to June 2026.
“We’re working right now to try and figure out [whether] there’s a problem of, we didn’t budget for it appropriately, or is there a problem with how overtime is being used? I don’t have an answer for that now, but we’re looking,” Zaleski said.
Since beginning the transition from an all-volunteer workforce to an official Department of Fire and Emergency Services with paid staff, Carroll has struggled to balance its budget, and ran out of its annual budget for the EMS department in October 2024.
The department also has about eight open positions, Zaleski said. While Carroll typically counts open positions as unspent money in its budget, Commissioner Michael Guerin noted that the number of open positions may be causing existing employees to work overtime, thereby straining a department that has faced high turnover in recent years.
“People get held over to complete shifts and just — it just happens,” Guerin said. “The money is an issue, obviously. But the worst part about it is how many times you do that to folks before they realize, ‘well, I don’t want to do this anymore.’ After you work 24 hours, it’s kind of like, you need to go home sometimes.”
The county has also underspent in other areas, including public works. Similar to fire and EMS, the public works department has several unfilled positions, and saved money on vehicle purchases that came in under budget.
Carroll also recently received its first chunk of tax revenue from the past year, which came in slightly higher than expected. Zaleski said that the county expected to receive approximately $5.3 million in this distribution and actually received $8.7 million. The excess revenue came from “reconciling distribution from a prior tax year,” Zaleski told the Carroll County Times.
The county is also expecting to see a bump in the property tax levy, which Zaleski attributed to rising property values.
While this could give Carroll slight flexibility in how it handles the rest of this year’s budget, commissioners warned that the county will need to plan carefully to ensure its fire and EMS department stays within bounds.
“This is still relatively new,” Zaleski said, referring to the department. “We’re still figuring out how to go about budgeting for it in an appropriate way, and… we could look backward and say, well, maybe we should have done something different, but not very different. I would argue that we have done things very well for this transition.”
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