Garrett Neese/Daily Mining Gazette Houghton County Administrator Ben Larson discusses the county’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget at a public hearing Tuesday night. The board unanimously approved the budget later in the meeting.

HOUGHTON — Houghton County approved an operating budget with $11.625 million in general fund appropriations at its meeting Tuesday.

In a budget summary sent to the board, Administrator Ben Larson said the county is in a “good place” financially. The general fund is projected to carry a fund balance of $5,439,043.25 at the end of September 2025, a 3.3% increase from the end of the current fiscal year.

The overall budget is nearly balanced, with only a $3,000 revenue surplus, Larson said.

“It’s going to be a razor-tight year, but that’s where we are,” he said.

Larson asked the board to consider boosting spending in two key areas. One is the need to upgrade the county’s aging informational technology infrastructure, which he called “the cost of computing.”

The 2025 budget raises spending in the computing department from $189,738 to $553,476.

“If you look what you guys allotted to computing last year, that’s not what we paid,” he said. “So a much more transparent way for you guys to see what we actually spend on having working computers that are protected on everyone’s desk.”

Many items should have been replaced five to eight years ago, said Bernard Kluskens, IT director at Houghton County.

“We bit some bullets this year, but there’s still more to go,” he said. “…They’re just big items that if big stuff goes down, they ain’t doing work. They can’t do anything. That’s the simple fact of the matter, and that’s what we’re trying to get ahead of before it comes to a head.”

The clock is running on many of the county’s computers, Larson said. Most of them can’t run anything newer than Windows 10, which Windows will stop supporting in October 2025.

“We could replace every computer here next year, but you can see that that would be a lot of stress on Bernard in 14 days if you guys did this next Oct. 1,” he said.

Replacement cycles for most hardware should run from about three to seven years, Kluskens said. Many of the computers are 10 to 12 years old, he said.

“You can’t run with that,” he said. “They’re barely chugging along right now.”

As the equipment ages, it also affects the county’s cybersecurity, he said.

At some point, Larson said, the county will also upgrade the 20- to 25-year-old office phones.

Prosecutor Dan Helmer thanked Kluskens for helping save an 12-year-old server that had become corrupted.

“We almost lost 20 years’ worth of case data, and that would have meant a complete shutdown of my office for months,” he said.

Larson also named the prosecuting attorney’s office as a key area to invest — $538,300, versus $441,572 in last year’s budget.

Helmer said he is still looking to have the board reclassify two positions. But he thanked the board for the funding it has provided, also introducing them to new Chief Assistant Prosecutor Hilary Baker. Helmer said the department is making progress, convicting a serial egger in a 97th District Court trial after six previous attempts ended in not guilty verdicts.

“Each one of you came to me individually at some point after I got here to offer words of encouragement or support, and you really followed through on those, and you started to look at the historic underfunding of my office and you started to correct that, and I really appreciate it,” he said.