POPLARVILLE — Budget woes continued to plague supervisors here on Wednesday, when practically the entire meeting was taken up with the discussion of the cash balance shortfall and the projected decline in revenues that portends trouble as supervisors try and hammer out a new fiscal year 2012-13 budget.

The cash balance shortfall looms at $500,000 and supervisors face absorbing a $1 million shortfall in funding, generated by lower land values, that will complicate putting together a new 2012-13 county budget. Property values in the county have fallen and will produce less revenue for the new budget.

Tension at the meeting was palpable.

And supervisor Anthony Hales, Sr., for the first time, mentioned the dreaded words “borrow” and “raising millage rates” to the board. However, no action in that vein was taken.

Board President and District Four Supervisor J. Patrick Lee vowed that “this county will not go backrupt.” He added, “We will do what we have to do.”

And the board grilled Sheriff David Allison on his implementation of the employee furlough policy adopted on June 25. The large budget carried by the sheriff’s office and the county prison is not generating the expected savings, supervisors indicated.

County Administrator Adrain Lumpkin, Jr., said he could not control sheriff department POs and asked the board to assume approval of the various POs generated out of the sheriff’s office, which the board did.

Punctuating a slight perturbation with Allison, the board voted down two of his requests during his regular session with the board where his requests are usually rubber-stamped.

He requested a camera to replace a stolen one, and supervisors rejected that request, and then rejected a request to pay off a late-model SUV seized in a drug raid. They told Allison to pay for it out of drug forfeiture funds, and then they went on to grill him later on how he is implementing the furlough program. Supervisor Joyce Culpepper asked him if investigators were being furloughed, and he said they weren’t, that their case loads were too heavy, and they’d get behind if furloughed.

County employee Maria Burge bluntly spoke to supervisors, and implied they weren’t exhibiting enough leadership in the crisis. She said they should park their trucks and give up their cell phones, and even take a pay cut, and suffer with the rest of the county employees, who are experiencing job furloughs. But Hales told her that if other county elected officials would take a cut, he would, too, and Lee told her he pays for his own cell phone and put in last week 80 hours dealing with county problems. Burge works for Chancery Clerk David Earl Johnson, who also addressed the board, inviting them over to his office to discuss his budget and telling them at one point to do what is necessary. “That is why you were elected,” he told the board.

County library system director Linda Tufaro was also before the board and said she was extremely worried about the future. She said her projections for beyond September are dire, and told the board, “We will continue to operate till the money runs out, and then we will just close the doors.”

“I understand the problems you face,” she added. She said the library board has been hit with $122,000 in cuts over two years and has laid off five employees. After addressing the board, she told the Item, “We can begin charging higher fees, but I don’t know how we can survive just on fee increases,” she said. She was accompanied to the board of supervisors meeting by Dr. James L. Schrock, chairman of the county library board, who did not address supervisors. Other library board members were present also.

She asked for a letter from supervisors, asking the state to delay, or waiver, funding cuts to the library based on cuts by supervisors. The state’s funding is based on how much local support the library gets. Supervisors said they would generate the letter for her to send to state authorities.

Supervisors lifted the furlough on the road department employees, which number about 54. In lifting the furlough on them, they said the road department’s budget was based on a set millage, that they were within their budget and the road department budget had no impact on the general fund, which was showing the shortfall.

But it remained clamped on the rest of county employees.

Burge told superevisors many county employees are talking about quitting or looking for other jobs.

Asked if the county would run out of money, Lumpkin said the county has enough money to make it through September, but he said projections after September remained unclear. He said the lowest part of the year for low funding is the fall, as the county waits for tax funds to roll in at the first of next year.

Lumpkin said auditors have told him other counties were having the same problems as Pearl River County, some even worse, but their problems are not being reported by the press like Pearl River’s problems are. “We have been open about this process and problem,” he said.