The Androscoggin County budget continues to rise year after year, placing mounting pressure on towns already struggling to hold down local taxes, according to town and city leaders.

In 2021, the county’s 14 municipalities paid $10.8 million toward county operations. This year, the amount is $17.4 million.

Kurt Schaub, Turner town manager, called the rate of increase “excessive.” His town paid the county $803,016 in 2024. This year, he said, it will pay more than $1 million.

“This year’s increase is 18.39%,” Schaub said. “Last year it was 11.52%, and in 2024 it was 12%,” growing far faster than people’s income.

“The cost of most everything goes up each year, mainly due to inflation, but not like this,” he said.

In Turner, as in other towns, local spending is dominated by the school budget. The municipal and county budgets make up a small portion of overall spending.

But with the county budget increasing at the same time that towns and cities face significant pressure to hold down taxes, it is getting more attention.

“The town is feeling pressure from everywhere for competing tax dollars,” said Carrie Castonguay, Livermore Falls town manager. “As you’re aware, the only portion of the tax assessment we can control is the municipal budget, which is a relatively small portion.”

Schaub and others said the increases are fueled by rising costs of county jails, and they say state funding is failing to keep up.

County Commissioner Sally Christner of Turner, who represents District 7 covering Turner, Leeds, Livermore, Livermore Falls and Minot, told fellow commissioners on March 4 to be aware of the effect of the tax rate on less populated towns.

“My point was to make us each aware of the negative effect this kind of a levy will have on the very towns that sent us there to represent them,” Christner wrote.

Without more state aid for jails, there isn’t much the county can do, she said.

“As a board we went through the budget line by line cutting $30 here and $50 there,” Christner wrote in an email. “A simple drop in the bucket. But it is not relief for the towns when the state has set us in a position with jail funding that is unfair to counties, towns and property taxpayers.”

Adam Platz, an Auburn city councilor, said his “understanding is that county government deals with much the same issues we do … increased demand for services amidst decreased state funding for those services, leading to increases in the tax levy.

“My understanding is that the funding model is outdated and falls short relative to rising costs,” Platz said. “This has been one of several ongoing challenges for counties in Maine.”  

It is putting places like Livermore Falls in a bind. In an attempt to hold down taxes, the town has put together a lean municipal budget that calls for reduced services, Castonguay said.

“This would be our only option for minimizing tax increases at the hands of the county and school, whose costs we have no control over,” she said. 

In late January, county leaders sent a letter to the state Legislature about the need for more state funding for the county jail in Auburn.

“The financial pressures we face in Androscoggin County due to the jail funding are real, growing and increasingly unattainable,” Jeff Chute, county administrator and former jail administrator, wrote in the letter.

The county has had to add $700,000 to this year’s budget for the jail. The amount had been increasing each year to board inmates at other jails because of overcrowding. The jail has 160 beds but routinely houses over 200 people, according to county officials.

Several of the state’s 15 county jails face the same issues.

“The costs are related to overcrowding, operational costs, increased contract costs, and inmate boarding,” Chute said. “Each year the county must cover a significant shortfall just to maintain basic operations.”

Those problems trickle down to the towns and cities.

In Minot, the town’s share of county tax rose $40,000 this year, Danielle Loring, town administrator, said.

She said she was assured by Lisa Cesare, who serves as chairperson of both the Minot Select Board and the Androscoggin County Budget Committee, county leaders cut as much as they could, but could not counteract the increase in jail expenses.

“They were stuck between a rock and a hard place and there was nothing that could be done about it,” Loring said.