By Sara QuamRock County received a statewide report on county finances last week.County Administrator Kyle Oldre said, "I think we look healthy."Much of the report from State Auditor Pat Anderson focuses on fund balances that counties carry, sometimes to hold for a "rainy day" and sometimes for designated planned expenditures.Rock County’s fund balance at the time of the report was $6.5 million, or 79 percent, which is considered high. Oldre said, "Some of our reserve funds are undesignated, but some of them will go to the new Law Enforcement Center and toward Heartland Express, if that building project goes through."Blue Earth County showed the highest fund balance in the state, with almost 200 percent of their annual budget sitting in reserves.The state prefers counties to have between 35 and 50 percent of their expenditures in reserves. With more than that in reserves, raising taxes would seem unnecessary.Oldre pointed out that Blue Earth is building a new law enforcement center and jail and in one year will have a normal fund balance, so it’s not as if the county was hoarding money."Sometimes looking at a fund balance doesn’t tell the whole story," Oldre said.The auditor’s report says that counties should have relatively large fund balances at the end of the year in order to meet expenditures occurring in the first five months of operations, before the first property tax and state aid payments arrive.The unreserved fund balances of counties’ general and special revenue funds totaled $1.77 billion in 2004. The report covers counties’ audited financial data for the year ended 2004. The details of the report show that county finances remained essentially flat from the previous year, meaning there was very little change in revenues received and tax dollars spent."Overall revenues and expenditures were flat for Minnesota counties when compared with the previous year," Anderson said in a press release. "The revenues have declined mostly due to reduction in state and federal aid. Counties have seemingly adjusted their spending to reflect the decrease in revenue. It appears that counties were much more affected by aid cuts than cities, which continued to see strong growth in revenues and expenditures in spite of cuts."The two largest sources of revenues for counties continue to be taxes and state intergovernmental revenues, which accounted for 39.8 and 31.7 percent of total revenues, respectively.