Riley County commissioners continued work on the proposed 2027 budget Thursday, reviewing department requests after directing officials to identify 2% reductions where possible.
Budget and finance officer Brittany Phillips said several departments were unable to meet the requested cuts because of mandatory obligations or unpredictable expenses.
“I want to be really clear that not every department was able to. They already came in with very low budgets, and some were just really not able to make that decrease,” Phillips said. “I’ll speak on budgets that I oversee, because I wasn’t able to lower all of them as well, so juvenile detention is one. I could not take 2% from that, just because we have no idea what those numbers are going to be, that is such a hard thing to estimate.”
