By Jamie Taylor

When the Lincoln County Board of Supervisors voted to reinstate Jeff Janik as the second shop foreman at the Merrill garage at their Jan. 19 board meeting, they put County Highway Commissioner Randy Scholz and the Highway Commission in a tough budgetary position for 2010.

When they voted to reinstate Janik, they failed to increase the department’s 2010 budget to cover the cost of his salary and benefits.

"We’re waiting to see what the county board does. Supposedly they are going to have that special meeting to talk about different alternatives. I’ll see what that does," Scholz said. "It’s about $94,000 is what that position factored into the budget."

Scholz said the county board has not put the additional money back into his budget, which might play a part in how much general maintenance is done this summer on county roads and highways.

"We have our paving set, we’re doing 1.25 miles of repaving and roughly 30 miles of chip sealing," he said. "If we don’t get the money back in, we’ll just reduce our general maintenance we’ll do."

Some of the work that would be cut back or eliminated would be grass and brush cutting on the sides of roads and the replacing of some culverts.

The Highway Commission will meet at 7:30 a.m. Thursday in the Tomahawk City Hall with the budget contingency playing a prominent role on the agenda.

One of the suggestions for cutting department costs discussed at the County Board meeting was offering early retirement packages to senior employees. Scholz said the commission would definitely consider the option as a way to trim its labor portion of its budget if the supervisors authorize such a measure.

"We’ll offer it to our guys and see if any of them are willing or able to take it," he said. "It depends on the criteria and all that stuff."

The relatively mild winter as far as snowfall is concerned has helped keep the department within its budget, but that can change with the fickle Wisconsin weather.

"I thought we were going to do really good in 2009 and then we got hit during Christmas and New Years, so we’re going to be pretty darn close (to our final budget)," he said. "All it takes is three days of ice to break your budget."