Oct 28, 2014 3 min read

Several years ago, Washington County Parks and Recreation Director Jeff Donahue went into a budget hearing armed with figures from projected natural gas well revenues in Cross Creek park.

The numbers were so large some who heard them dismissed his projections as pie in the sky.

It turned out Donahue was correct, and while many levels of government struggle to raise revenue, Washington County and its income from wells in the Marcellus Shale tapped beneath county-owned land reached six figures every month of the past year, for which figures are available.

So, for the fifth year in a row, property taxpayers of Washington County should see no increase in their 2015 county tax bills, based on the $82.7 preliminary budget prepared for the county commissioners. The 2014 final budget the commissioners adopted totaled $80.9 million.

The bulk of the $4,923,107 from the first seven months of 2014 comes from wells at Cross Creek County Park, but the total also includes smaller infusions of cash from wells under the county-owned fairgrounds and Panhandle Trail.

March had the smallest amount of Marcellus Shale income for the county with $454,320, while the highest was $959,323 in April. There is a lag of approximately three months in receiving checks, so August figures were not immedately available for this story. The monthly figures do not include the $5.9 million Washington County government received through Act 13 impact fees, which carry some usage restrictions.

In the background of budget preparations is the Washington County property reassessment project, which began a little over a year ago. Employees of Tyler Technologies Inc. have fanned out in various parts of the county to collect information on residential and commercial property. Due in large part to the county’s income from the extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale, county government did not have to go into debt through a bond issue to pay for the $6.9 million cost of the reassessment project. Property owners won’t be seeing county and municipal tax bills reflecting the new property values until January 2017.

The county commissioners waged a five-year court battle to avoid a reassessment sought by the Washington and McGuffey school districts, but finally threw in the towel last year when they ran out of legal avenues.

The 2015 budget is based on a tax levy of 24.9 mills.

The second version of the county’s spending plan, known as the “posted budget” should be ready Nov. 21 and the commissioners expect to adopt the final budget at their last meeting of the year Dec. 18.