Tuscarawas County, Ohio (WJER) - The Tuscarawas County Commissioners have approved the 2019 general fund budget ahead of their normal schedule. 

Commissioner Chris Abbuhl calls it a balanced $25.1 million spending blueprint that allocates about $600,000 for capital improvement projects. He says some of that will be going to the sheriff's office (for new cruisers, along with continued 9-1-1 center updates approved by voters earlier this year.)

“We were able to use some appropriations from 2018 to get cruisers at a better price, so we did get some additional cruisers. Of course, with the 911 system, the new system that’s going into place, that was a huge capital cost,” he says. 

Abbuhl says they used end-of-year estimates to approve this budget nearly two months earlier than in past years ahead of Commissioner-elect Al Landis taking office. 

“We were very aggressive with that and working whole days on the budget so that we were able to get it done by the end of the year rather than going into next year,” he says. “Usually, we’ve gotten done in the past somewhere around the second week of February but we did put it on a fast track, and we think it went very well.”

Abbuhl says because they finished the budget early, he anticipates some small adjustments as the new year moves along, which he says they have already accounted for.

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