Sheridan County Conservation District FY 2022 Budget Much Larger Than Normal

The Sheridan County Conservation District is not complaining about the new budget it gets to work with, for the 2022 fiscal year.

Recently the board approved a budget of 930-thousand dollars, which is about 2 and one-half to 3 times the normal amount.

Most of that money comes from federal, state and private donation grants and it’s also dependent on the project requests by landowners.

You might think that dollar amount should be much lower as a result of the COVID pandemic, but Conservation District Manager Carrie Rogaczewski says most of the grant money was already in place, before the pandemic started.

“Actually our last 2 years have been substantially higher than what we typically have, because of some of the large funding pieces through the USDA, the emergency watershed protection program, and some of the other large projects that we don’t typically have on a year to year basis, and because those were grant funded and didn’t really affect the day to day operations, we didn’t see a big change in those related to COVID.”

Rogaczewski says day to day operations of the district during the COVID pandemic were not impacted much, due to small office space, a small staff, and the ability to do work from home.