Four months into fiscal year 2010, the county’s budget is in good shape, county Finance Manager Butch Burbage said at the Feb. 22 County Commission meeting.

Right now, the county has brought in approximately $39,600 less than was projected in the budget, which is close enough to projections that the rest of the year should follow the early trend, Burbage said.

“It’s not necessarily a prediction of what’s going to happen for the next eight months, but we feel pretty good,” he said. “If we’re this close after four months, I have a higher confidence level that the total budget’s going to be pretty close to what we projected.”

Even though the county’s revenues are slightly under projections, there have been pleasant surprises. Revenues from building permits total more than $217,000, which is about $67,000 higher than the projected $150,000 for the first four months of this fiscal year.

In the first four months of the 2009 fiscal year, the county only received $61,400 in building fund revenues.

“We had one building permit come in for about $150,000 from a commercial development that we weren’t expecting,” Burbage said.

Burbage said the $84.2 million budget is a flexible budget, which means it can be changed to respond to economic realities.

“It’s not set in stone. If revenues were to come in higher or lower, we’ll adjust higher or lower,” he said.