At the end of Monday night's county commission meeting, Loudon County Mayor Doyle Arp took members of the Loudon County School Board to task for their failure to present the commission with a budget.

This has put the entire county budget on hold since the school budget is the biggest piece of the county budget puzzle. 

School board members Van Shaver and Lisa Russell along with Director of Loudon County Schools Wayne Honeycutt were in the audience at the meeting. 

"We need to get moving forward on the budget process," Arp said, announcing the county budget committee would meet Aug. 11 at noon in the County Office Building.

He then decried the school board for being unable to agree on a budget. "I don't know what the problem is," Arp said warning the school board members the county would be the "laughing stock of Tennessee" if a budget was not passed. 

"We need to get on with our business," Arp said adding citizens deserve a budget before the state steps in and makes one for the county. Arp also said he thought the problem with the school board arriving at a budget was that "some people thrive on chaos - I don't." 

Commissioner Don Miller said he didn't know if the "school folks" were aware of the fact that if the county doesn't submit a budget to the state by mid-September the schools would not get their share of the Basic Education Program (BEP) money from the state which makes up the majority of the budget for most schools including Loudon County. Miller said that would lead to "serious problems."  

He also pointed out after the commission gets a proposed budget from the school board it will take "four to six weeks before we can sit up here and vote on it" because it has to be integrated into the county budget, commissioners will have to study the proposed overall budget and it will have to be posted in the newspaper 10 days before a vote.

Miller said if the school board cannot agree on a budget request "the budget committee will have to set a budget and proceed."

Speaking after the meeting Shaver said he was not aware of any regulations or case law that would allow the budget committee to decide on a budget for the county schools, but he did say that, given the difficultly the school board was having deciding on the budget, he would not necessarily be opposed to the county government giving the school board an idea of how much they are willing to fund.

"Those of us who are trying to get to a budget - I wouldn't have a problem with it - pick a number and say 'that's it, that's what you get,' but legally I don't think they can do that," Shaver said.

The school board will meet Thursday, Aug. 6 for a workshop at the Tech Center in Lenoir City. 

"I may ask Thursday night that we move the budget to number one on the list. It's the most important thing we have to discuss," Shaver said.  

Board member Lisa Russell also was not sure if the county budget committee could decide on a budget for the schools. She said she knew of no precedent for such a move.

"I don't know if they can or cannot," she said.

Russell went on to say Honeycutt has come to the school board with several different budget proposals but, apparently, "the majority didn't think it was worthy of approval."

After the meeting, Miller clarified what he had said earlier regarding the county budget committee setting a budget for the school system. What he should have said was the commission would do so, he said. 

"We've never done it before. The only constant we have is, we have to give them at least as many dollars as we gave them last year. 

Basically, what we're setting, because we don't control the state funding, is how many pennies of property tax to give them, which in effect sets their budget because the state money is whatever it is and the sales tax money is whatever it is. 

The only real variable that the commission can influence is the property tax pennies going to the school system," Miller explained. 

"The key is if we don't have a Loudon County budget approved by the county commission by the middle of September, whenever the first BEP payment is due from the state in September, we won't get it. Then we might have a major problem on our hands," he said. 

"It's something we'd rather not do, but we're getting to the point we may not have a choice," Miller said.