Carbon County’s Children and Youth Services presented its 2026-2027 needs based plan Thursday.

The commissioners unanimously approved the $11,109,173 plan, which now goes to the state for approval. This budget is an increase of $1,865,345 over the 2024-2025 needs based budget request.

Carbon County is responsible for 20 percent of the budget, while the state is responsible for the remaining 80 percent; however the budget impasse currently taking place between the state legislators and governor leave the county with several questions on who will be paying the larger portion of the bill.

Carbon County has currently loaned Children and Youth approximately $1.5 million to keep the department operating because of the impasse and will be acting on another loan in the very near future.

Commissioners’ Chairman Mike Sofranko said that while the county isn’t thrilled with being forced to pass an $11 million budget with questions on who is footing that bill, it needed to be passed.

“We’re doing the best we can ... but they need to get this budget passed or at least money flowing into the counties,” he said. “Jill (Geissinger) sitting back there right now, I think we send her roughly a half a million dollars every two weeks to keep just the office moving.”

Geissinger understands the tight position the state is putting counties in, noting that right now, 37 of the providers Carbon County Children and Youth has contracts with are not being paid because of the state delay.

“So that not only affects the county, that affects the people providing the services for these placements that are suffering,” Commissioner Wayne Nothstein said. “In 2015-2016, when we went through this, it was January when they passed the budget. Owners in these places were taking mortgages out on their home to stay afloat. That is the urgency of getting this (state) budget passed because it affects so many people, schools, children and youth, all the way around.”

Regarding the proposed Children and Youth Budget, Geissinger said that there are some items that have increased, including the number of youth in care.

“We have 47 teens in care and they’re very hard to place,” she said, “so we have to put them into congregate care or group home settings. All of those settings have increased their prices for 2026-2027.”

Because of these increases and placements, the department has earmarked $700,000 for anticipated costs for provider care.

In addition, staffing is another large cost.

Currently, there are 14 caseworkers and four supervisors. Each caseworker has approximately 22 cases, just under the state’s cap of 30 families per caseworker.

Geissinger said ideally, she would like to have 24 caseworkers, however 10 of those spots remain vacant.

“We want to try and recruit and get all our positions filled so that we have enough staff to deal with all those things,” she said.

Other areas within the budget include 15 anticipated adoptions, upgrades for the juvenile probation office to help keep track of the kids in that program and changing one position to a social worker position due to a 15 percent increase in cases of mental health issues in the adult members of families they are working with.

“We’re getting a lot more referrals on parents who need mental health services,” Geissinger said.

Geissinger also held a public hearing Thursday regarding the needs based budget, which outlined additional items within the budget. This hearing, which was livestreamed on the county commissioners’ Facebook page, can be viewed in its entirety at https://fb.watch/BWFPB0PysX.