The Thurston County Board of County Commissioners voted 3-2 on Tuesday, Dec. 16, to approve the county’s 2026-27 budget.
Commissioners Carolina Mejia, Wayne Fournier and Tye Menser voted to approve the budget, with Commissioners Rachel Grant and Emily Clouse voting “no.”
Grant and Clouse said their votes were not a reflection on county staff’s work, but were due to concerns about a lack of transparency throughout the process and a lack of clarity in the budget documents.
“It's about process and transparency, and what I feel is our responsibility as stewards of public funds,” Grant said.
She added that she felt there was a lack of timely department-level budget documents, clear comparisons to prior years and sufficient explanation of budget impacts.
“Budget documents need to clearly show what is funded, why it's funded, and how it's funded, in detail,” Grant said. “I'm not going to put my name on a document, unless I can verify that what I'm putting my name on has accurate numbers.”
Thurston County is in the middle of a multi-year implementation of a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software system that presented “operational and technical challenges” during the development of this year’s budget, according to budget documents.
All county departments are “actively engaged in identifying, developing, and applying solutions to improve system performance, enhance data integrity, and ensure timely and accurate financial reporting,” the budget reads.
Clouse shared similar concerns to Grant.
“I'm committed to fiscal responsibility, but fiscal responsibility requires clarity, consistency and transparency,” Clouse said, asking that the board of commissioners commit to redoing the budget process in 2026 to be more transparent and easier for the public to understand.
The county was looking at an estimated structural deficit of $23.8 million in 2025 that worsened in the 2026-27 biennium.
In response, the county took a proposed 26% general fund reduction — over $36 million — and whittled it down to a total of $9.84 million in cuts.
County department heads testified during a Dec. 1 public hearing that just proposing the 26% general fund reduction led to a large staff turnover for fear that their positions would be cut.
While the final cuts aren’t as devastating as the initial proposal, departments are still seeing significant budget reductions.
District Court and the Treasurer’s Office are the only two departments whose budgets won’t be reduced in the 2026-27 biennium.
Social Services and Superior Court each see cuts under $6,000, and Public Works receives a $21,175 reduction. All other departments have budget reductions between $100,000 and $700,000.
The Thurston County Sheriff’s Office, Prosecuting Attorney’s Office and Juvenile Court still see the biggest dollar amount cuts, though far less than they would have under the first draft of the budget.
The sheriff’s office sees a $1.24 million cut to law enforcement and a $1.29 million cut to corrections in the final budget — $2.5 million total — down from $5.58 million to law enforcement and $7.7 million to corrections.
The Thurston County Prosecutor’s Office will see $1.36 million in cuts rather than the initial proposed $3.49 million, and Juvenile Court will lose $1.18 million rather than $2.32 million.
Thurston County Sheriff Derek Sanders has expressed that he is not worried about the cuts impacting his department because it is supported by the public safety tax fund, which had a balance of $6.5 million as of October 2025, according to previous reporting. The fund is financed by the Public Safety Sales Tax approved by voters in April 2024 and is separate from the county general fund.
The county commission also voted Tuesday to create a fund to house its portion of the 0.1% state Public Safety Sales Tax approved by the state Legislature earlier this year through HB 2015.
That funding has already been allocated into the 2026-27 budget and helped the county mitigate the cuts to the courts and the clerk’s office, according to county staff.
“This budget is the result of months of collaboration, analysis and responsible stewardship,” Mejia said, adding that, while she does have some concerns — particularly about how draining the county’s road fund to balance the budget will impact future maintenance efforts. “But we did it to keep essential services.”
If the commission did not approve the budget on Tuesday, the county would have to redo the budget before Jan. 1 or have operations come to a “grinding halt,” staff said.
Menser called Clouse’s and Grant’s votes “irresponsible,” saying he was “shocked” to see commissioners vote against the budget.
“You’re both saying because the process wasn't transparent, the public can't understand it, you’re going to vote no on the budget? I’m shocked by that,” Menser said.
Clouse responded to elaborate that her “no” vote stems from concerns about allocations within the budget, saying her comments and concerns about the department deficits were often dismissed or set aside by her fellow commissioners.
“To be hearing this, at this point of the stage where we are here, it is very frustrating,” Meijia said, adding that Clouse and Grant have been given ample opportunity to comment and add their input throughout the process.
Clouse responded that she felt her suggestions have repeatedly been turned down.
Regarding the specifics of the budget, Clouse said she felt there is an imbalance between the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office being largely unimpaired by the budget cuts while the courts and the clerks’ office face higher impacts.
Menser said he was disappointed that Clouse and Grant didn’t respect the level of work that went into reducing the budget deficit from $36 million to $9.84 million and the work to divide up the cuts.
“There was a bigger impact to the clerk. That’s where it landed. It could have been somewhere else,” Menser said. “There’s so many decisions embedded. No one's ever going to be able to say ‘that's the perfect budget I would have written.’ But I really feel like we worked so hard to get a really big deficit closed in that I would like to feel like we could all, at least on that basis, say we support this as a democratic representation of what the board did.”
Fournier declined to comment on Clouse and Grant’s decisions to vote “no” on the budget. “We’re all trying to describe motives and things like that. We’ve had these discussions. We know what everybody probably really thinks, and we know what everybody really thinks, and I don’t want to play this game,” he said.
Following the budget vote, Fournier and Clouse devolved into a back-and-forth argument, with Clouse continuing her comments about how she felt her suggestions to the board had been ignored, and Fournier refuting her statements.
Clouse spoke about how the board “really needs to consider what accessibility looks like,” how she disagrees with the board’s handling of public comments, and how she felt like she didn’t have the information she needed to understand the budget.
The two commissioners continued interrupting each other and telling the other that their statements were untrue before Menser intervened to limit discussion to the remaining agenda items.
The Thurston County 2026-27 budget can be reviewed online at https://tinyurl.com/4kb86m2r.
