Berks County Eyes 3.4% Tax Hike or $15.8M in Cuts for 2027

Berks County's chief financial officer told the commissioners Thursday that the county cannot keep paying its bills the way it does now. To stay within the county's own rule on how much money it keeps in reserve, Laura Jones's presentation says the 2027 budget would need a 3.4 percent tax increase, the elimination of $15.8 million in what the slides call discretionary spending, or a mix of the two. The cut list names the public library system, the county parks, farmland preservation, veterans affairs and the Greater Reading Chamber Alliance.

No vote was taken. The presentation was a briefing on what Jones's slides call "Unsustainable Math," ahead of a proposed 2027 budget that the Reading Eagle reported will be unveiled at the board's Nov. 19 meeting. The county's calendar lists a regular board meeting that day and says nothing about the budget.

What a 3.4 percent increase would cost

The county's property tax rate is 9.013 mills, set with a 2025 increase that followed one in 2024 and held for 2026. A mill is $1 of tax for every $1,000 of assessed value. Jones's slide 12 says a 3.4 percent increase "Results in an additional $30.64 per $100K assessed value." That matches the arithmetic: 3.4 percent of 9.013 mills is about 0.31 mills, or $30.64 a year on a property assessed at $100,000. Berks assessments date to a 1994 base year, so an assessed value is not a market value. Our property tax explainer covers how county, municipal and school bills fit together.

The alternative on the same slide is to "Eliminate discretionary spending," listed as:

• Library Systems, $5.8 million
• Parks, $4.6 million
• Agriculture Preservation, $2.0 million
• Connections Work, $1.2 million
• Veterans Affairs, $1.0 million
• Agriculture Services, $0.7 million
• Greater Reading Chamber Alliance, $0.5 million

Those seven lines add up to $15.8 million by our count; the slide does not total them. Discretionary spending is money the county chooses to spend rather than money state or federal law requires it to spend; the slides do not say whether any of the seven carries a state mandate that would limit how far it could be cut. The slide offers a third path, "a combination of both," and lists a fourth item under the same heading: new debt payments for building improvements. It does not say which option the administration favors, or whether the commissioners would cut any program entirely rather than trim it.

The two options are not the same size. By our arithmetic, a 3.4 percent increase on the $179.6 million the county budgets from property taxes this year would raise about $6.1 million a year, well short of the $15.8 million cut list. The slides do not state the size of the reserve shortfall they are meant to close, so the gap between the two figures is unexplained.

Slide 10, an infographic on how each dollar of tax revenue is spent, puts the cut list in proportion: public safety, which the graphic defines as probation and the county jail, takes 37 cents, the courts 27 cents, general government 10 cents, community and economic development 8 cents, human services 5 cents, debt service 4 cents, and "libraries, parks, and recreation programs" 4 cents, with 1 cent for 911 and 3 cents for miscellaneous costs. The nine shares add to 99 cents.

Why the county says the math no longer works

The presentation lays out the pressures in order. Inflation is running at 3.4 percent over the past 12 months, gasoline is up 27.4 percent and energy commodities are up 28 percent (slide 2). Wages are rising to attract and keep workers and through union contracts, and under state law higher wages mean higher pension costs; health insurance costs are up too (slide 3).

Slide 4 lists what the county has taken on: the purchase of 600 Penn Street, which brings "additional capital needs and operating expense for maintenance, security and utilities"; utilities at the South Campus in Mohnton; a "New Regional Youth Center"; security upgrades; coming debt payments for renovating the downtown campus, meaning 600 Penn and the Services Center; replacement of the 911 radio system; and a move of the county's Oracle ERP system, its business software, to the cloud. The county's running record of the 600 Penn Street purchase is on our tracker. The youth center is the former county juvenile detention center in Bern Township, which Berks voted in July to reopen with four other counties as a regional facility; the county put its renovation out to bid on Oct. 8.

The result, according to slides 5 and 6: the 2026 adopted budget's forecast "has operating deficits for all years in future," revenues are not growing as fast as costs, and the general fund reserve "Falls below required level in 2028 per forecast." The county has used its fund balance, its accumulated savings, to pay for capital projects. The slide says it can no longer do that, so capital work "will instead require debt service," which adds to yearly operating costs. Jones also tied the reserve to the county's Moody's Aaa bond rating, the top grade: a 15-basis-point difference in interest, the slide says, is worth "$600K savings" on a $20 million bond.

The slides refer only to "our fiscal policy." The Eagle reported that Jones described it as keeping enough in reserve to cover three months of operations; our report on the 2026 budget described the policy as at least 60 days of operating expenses. The two descriptions do not match, and the deck does not settle it. The Eagle also put the needed revenue increase at about 3.5 percent, where the slide says 3.4 percent.

The Eagle quoted Commissioner Christian Leinbach saying the county felt it necessary to bring the information to the public to be transparent about the pressures, and Commissioner Michael Rivera saying 87 cents of every dollar the county spends is generated by property taxes. That share does not match the deck's 62 percent, which is property taxes' share of general fund operating revenue, and it cannot be a share of the county's full $690 million budget, where our 2026 report found county property taxes cover about a quarter. The Eagle does not say what Rivera was measuring.

Where the money comes from

Property taxes are 62 percent of the county's general fund operating revenue, $179,589,112 in 2026, per slide 8. The rest comes from internal charges and transfers (15 percent), department earnings (8 percent), other revenue (8 percent) and grants (7 percent). The general fund is the part of the budget that county taxes support directly; our report on the $690 million 2026 budget shows how it fits inside the whole, including the roughly $16 million gap reserves were already covering this year.

Slide 11 is the chart the rest of the presentation rests on. It runs from 2016 through 2026 and does not label its base year. By 2026, cumulative growth in consumer prices reaches 41.63 percent. The county's taxable assessed value, the base the tax rate is applied to, grows 7.77 percent over the same span. The county tax rate rises 20.86 percent, in three steps: 3.87 percent in 2018, a jump to 12.86 percent cumulative in 2024 and to 20.86 percent in 2025. The chart is the county's case that growth in its tax base has not kept pace with inflation.

The county's press release calls the talk a "2026 County Budget Update"; the slides themselves are titled "County of Berks 2027 Budget Update." The release links the slide deck and a county YouTube recording of the presentation.

The rest of the meeting

BCTV's recording lists the budget presentation from the 3-minute mark to the 36-minute mark, followed by a presentation on Bountiful Berks, the county Department of Agriculture's buy-local program, and approval of the agenda at the 54-minute mark. The county has not yet posted minutes of the meeting, so the vote on Resolutions 309 through 315.2026 is not in any document; as it did on Oct. 8, the board votes on its whole agenda at once. The items, covered in our preview, included:

• Letters of support for $1.55 million in state PHARE housing requests from Habitat for Humanity of Berks County ($300,000), Opportunity House ($750,000 for housing at 325 S. 12th St. in Reading) and the Berks County Redevelopment Authority ($500,000 for eviction prevention). The agenda attaches no county money to the letters.
• A $91,062 transfer inside Children and Youth Services to pay outside lawyers "due to Solicitor vacancy," per the Oct. 9 budget listing in the agenda packet.
• A $189,160 chiller for the Services Center and a $192,286.18 paving change order at the county jail.
• A jail sergeant and an emergency-services training manager, and an increase in the arraignment stipend to $100 per pay period, a rate the agenda says "has not been revised since 2007."

The county also posted the minutes of the Oct. 8 meeting on Thursday. They record a routine session: the agenda approved as presented on a motion by Commissioner Michael Rivera seconded by Commissioner Dante Santoni Jr., $307,093 in budget transfers and $1,024,306 in appropriations, three personnel actions, a presentation by Reading Regional Airport director Zackary Tempesco, and one public comment, from a Cumru Township resident about ICE.

What happens next

The county has not posted a schedule for the 2027 budget. If the Nov. 19 date the Eagle reported holds, the proposed budget would arrive five weeks after this briefing; the 2026 budget was adopted on Dec. 18 last year. Residents can speak at any board meeting, in person at 10 a.m. Thursdays in the 13th-floor boardroom of the Berks County Services Center, 633 Court St., Reading, or through the Microsoft Teams link on each meeting's notice; see how to speak at a commissioners meeting. The slides label all seven programs on the cut list discretionary, and the budget meetings this fall are where the commissioners decide what that label is worth.