As Carroll County Management and Budget Director Ted Zaleski presented a proposed $581 million fiscal 2026 operating budget for the county government Tuesday, he again issued a stark warning that massive cuts to the federal government could negatively impact the county’s budget plans.

This is the same ominous warning Zaleski gave to the Board of Carroll County Commissioners when he first presented the recommended budget in March. And, since then, cuts to federal agencies, looming tariffs and drastic downturns in the stock market, have done nothing to tamp down that uncertainty.

“I’m also going to mention what’s happening at the federal government right now,” Zaleski said Tuesday morning while presenting the proposed budget to commissioners. “This is going to come up in other places during the budget. There’s a lot more we don’t know about what federal changes are going to mean, than we do know. This is continuing to play out. I can’t pretend that we have planned for it in this budget, because we just don’t know enough.”

Zaleski warned that federal budget cuts will likely trickle down to the state budget, which will directly affect funding coming to the county.

“What the state does has a lot of impact on Carroll County,” he said. “What happens at the state matters a lot to us. When the state has a budget problem the county has a budget problem, too. … On the state budget it is possible if not likely that choices made at the federal level are going to affect the state budget.

“Possibly by billions of dollars,” he said. “Going back to what I said a little bit earlier, when the state has a budget problem we have a budget problem. So, this is not just something that the state should be concerned about. We also will have to be concerned.”

Carroll County officials are attempting to prepare for what may come. For the first time commissioners have taken Zaleski’s suggestion to set aside 5% of the unassigned fund balance.

“Something else that’s new, and I think it is a really a good thing for fiscal planning and fiscal security, is that commissioners are going to set aside 5% in fund balance not to be earmarked for any purpose, but to be available if the situation leads to the need.

“That need could be something like a sudden downturn in revenues,” he said. “Mandates from the state or federal government that we didn’t expect or planned for. Some expenditure we hadn’t planned for, or, and I hope this doesn’t come again, but even something like COVID, where we were actually planning for a severe reduction in revenues between federal actions.”

Under the proposed budget, spending would rise from $545 million this fiscal year to $581 million in the fiscal year beginning July 1.

The commissioners added $5.8 million to the budget for Carroll County Public Schools. “That’s on top of the $7.2 million that was already in the recommended budget,” Zaleski said. “So, it’s a total increase from [2025 to 2026] of $13 million.”

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