Boone County approves 2026 budget, includes new pay plan for employees
Keriana Gamboa
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
The Boone County Commission on Thursdays approved the finalized budget for the 2026 fiscal year.
Including money being using from the American Rescue Plan Act, expenditures for the new fiscal year are expected to total $156 million.
Officials say the budget will allow for pay raises for some county employees.
Presiding Commissioner Kip Kendrick says the new pay plan is a different approach to county compensation. As part of the restructuring, positions have been grouped into job “families” like law enforcement, IT, administration, and engineering to ensure pay stays competitive across different fields.
The new system breaks pay into three components:
Cost-of-living increases
Step raises that move employees toward market-pay levels
Discretionary pay for performance, promotions and other merit-based factors
Boone County Auditor Kyle Rieman said the new pay structure also helps communicate to employees why they are receiving a pay increase or why they may not in certain cases.
Kendrick said the county will continue updating the plan as the county grows to make sure employees’ pay remains competitive.
“We’ll be able to kind of touch that each and every year. And so this is a more interactive pay plan and something that we can, you know, likely keep on top of better, from our end at the county level, to make sure that it, you know, that it moves forward, that it doesn’t remain stagnant,” Kendrick said.
In late 2023, the county hired McGrath Consulting Group to review salaries and found 51% of the nearly 500 county employees were being paid below market levels.
The findings prompted a complete overhaul of the county’s pay policy, aimed at aligning employee salaries more closely with market rates.
Rieman said the county has budgeted $3.9 million to implement the new pay plan and cover 2026 pay increases.
He also adds the proposed revenue projection is $121 million, when not including American Rescue Plan Act money.
Kendrick added while this year’s budget isn’t as large as usual, the county has set aside enough reserve funds to cover major capital projects.
“We will spend more than we’re taking in next year. But our reserves allow us to do that. We’ve been planning these large capital projects for a number of years,” Kendrick said. Large projects such as the, eight megahertz system by the time that’s fully implemented from helping by the radios to building new towers is probably a little over a $20 million project.”