The Platte County auditor has spoken out to clarify statements made by the commission at a contentious meeting held last month.
On Wednesday, Jan. 21, the Platte County Commission meeting included a back-and-forth confrontation among Sheriff Erik Holland, Prosecutor Eric Zahnd and Presiding Commissioner Scott Fricker. While Holland and Zahnd protested what they consider cuts to their annual budgets – cuts that will force potential reductions in law enforcement services – Fricker presented a spreadsheet showing increases to those departmental budgets over the past several years. Fricker used the spreadsheet to state that increases given to those departments were unsustainable, leading to the commission setting lower budgets for both departments this year.
Over the weekend, Auditor Kevin Robinson issued a press release stating he was not included in the development, review or validation of the commission’s financial summary table prior to its public presentation. As the county’s independently elected financial officer, the auditor is responsible for examining, reconciling, and publicly reporting accurate financial information. Following the meeting, the auditor conducted a detailed review of the statements made and the data used to support them.
His findings were:
The summary table presented reflects only beginning-of-year adopted budgets and excludes budget amendments and adjustments made throughout each fiscal year.
Several statements made during the meeting relied on incomplete or non-comparable figures, including the omission of departments realigned under the County’s new Chart of Accounts.
When budgets are evaluated using amended and adjusted gross expenditure figures, the data does not support several claims made during the meeting.
“The public deserves accurate, complete, and comparable financial information,” Robinson said. “When figures are presented without amendments, without accounting for structural changes, or without independent verification, the resulting conclusions can be misleading.”
He went on to break down a few of the claims made Jan. 21:
Claim: “Sheriff and Prosecuting Attorney budgets have increased at an annual rate of 29%.”
Using comparable gross expenditure data, the average annual increase from fiscal years 2022– 2026 is:
Sheriff: 10.57%
Prosecuting Attorney: 10.15%
Claim: “The Sheriff’s budget increased by $6 million over 2025.”
That figure relies on an incomplete 2025 adopted budget that omitted realigned departments. Using the corrected amended budget, the 2026 increase is approximately $207,000.
Claim: “Looking back at 2024, the Sheriff’s budget increased $15 million, or 66%.”
The Sheriff’s amended gross expenditure budget increased by $4.4 million, or 21.6%, from fiscal year 2024 to 2026.
Robinson also said that statements suggesting that reserve transfers reflect fiscal imbalance omit critical context. The Law Enforcement Tax was intentionally structured with reserve capacity to offset periods when law enforcement costs exceed revenues. Use of reserves in 2026 aligns with projections established during the tax’s development and does not indicate a budget shortfall.
Commissioners responded to Robinson’s release at the Monday, Feb. 2 meeting, with Fricker stating Robinson had forfeited his independence as an officeholder and was operating as a mouthpiece for the sheriff and prosecutor.
“He is a woefully inadequate budget officer,” Fricker said, stating during the budgeting process the auditor had presented a budget “completely void of any context,” surmising that Robinson had merely taken budget requests from officeholders and department heads and placed them in a book. “He doesn’t have any feedback for the commission as to how this budget fits in with the overall direction of the county.”
Fricker admitted commissioners had made mistakes, but said that they were learning more about the budget and how to analyze it. Which, he said, shouldn’t be their job, as the commission is a policy-making body.
“We’re left with the task of figuring out how this fits in with past budgets and future budgets, and that’s okay, we’ll keep doing that,” Fricker said. “The auditor, who is the budget officer, does nothing – none of that – and so we do our best in a very short period of time to come up with our projections on how this is going to affect the county in the future.”
Commissioner Joe Vanover echoed Fricker’s comments.
“I have read Platte County Auditor Kevin Robinson’s latest press release.,” he said. “I have studied the budget for hours. We worked on the budget for weeks. Even the county auditor says the law enforcement budgets have increased by an average of 10 percent each year from 2022 to 2026. Their budgets have increased by millions of dollars. No one with a rational mind could look at that and say we are defunding law enforcement.”