The Lowndes County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to not withdraw any money from the hospital trust fund this fiscal year.
During Friday’s supervisors meeting, County Administrator Jay Fisher told the board the fund had lost money over the course of fiscal year 2022, which ended Sept. 30.
The trust was established with $30 million the county received from the sale of the county hospital in 2006. In 2013 state law was changed to allow Lowndes County to invest trust fund money in stocks and bonds.
Each budget year the county may make a withdrawal of up to 3 percent of the value of the investments, but not if the balance goes down, as it did this year due to an extremely volatile stock market.
According to figures provided by Fisher, the fund included $40,022,337 as of Aug. 31, 2021. At that time, the board withdrew $1.2 million, leaving a total of $38,821,667.
After a rough market year, that number dropped, Fisher said.
“We saw a loss of $3,062,899,” Fisher said. “That’s a 7.89 percent loss for the year.”
During the same period, the S&P 500 saw a 19.2 percent loss.
When the fund takes a loss on the fiscal year, the county may not make a withdrawal, explained President Trip Hairston after the meeting.
“We could withdraw last year because we were above the previous year’s corpus,” he said. “Because we’re below where we were last year, that kept us from withdrawing anything this year.”
The new corpus will be set at $38.8 million for this fiscal year, Hairston said.
“If it’s above that (figure) next Aug. 31, we can draw up to 3 percent of the amount,” he explained.
Hairston said the fund’s performance over the years has been very good for the county.
“We started out with $30 million in the bank, and as of Aug. 31, 2021 that had grown to $40 million,” he said. “We’ve drawn out $7.2 million since 2014, and that’s pretty impressive.”
The largest withdrawal so far was last year’s $1.2 million, according to figures provided by Fisher. The smallest was in a 2016 withdrawal of $73,050.
The fiscal year 2023 budget, which the supervisors passed Sept. 15, did not include anything from the hospital fund. Fisher said at that time the board would not make a withdrawal this year. Friday’s vote was a formalization of that decision.
Money from the hospital fund has been used in the past for capital improvement projects, including the new health department on Lehmberg Road and the new Justice Court building on Martin Luther King Drive.
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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