NATCHEZ — Adams County’s government moved this week to freeze pre-budget spending a month early this week in response to lower than anticipated oil and gas severance tax collection.

The county has in recent years adopted a policy of stopping all discretionary spending June 1 as the county administrator and board of supervisors start planning for budgeting for the next fiscal year.

This year, however, the move came the first week of May because County Administrator Joe Murray projects at least a $340,000 shortfall in budgeted revenues derived from oil and gas severance taxes.

At the end of March, which is halfway through the fiscal year, the county had only received approximately 27 percent of the projected revenues from the tax.

“There is going to be a direct correlation with the price of oil,” Murray said. “Even if the oil prices creep up between now and September, it will probably help, but there’s no way we will make it up.”

In addition to the sustained low prices in the world oil market, Adams County’s revenues were hit by the high water event on the Mississippi River earlier this year, Murray said.

“Oil production in Adams County is in the flood plains,” Murray said. “If you can’t get the trucks in there to get the oil, the wells aren’t in production.”

The county had budgeted for approximately $675,000 in severance revenue, $475,00 for the general fund and $200,000 for the road department.

While the shortfall isn’t good, the county should be able to absorb it, Supervisors’ President Mike Lazarus said.

“We have got cash balances built into our budget, so it is not the end of the world,” he said. “It is cutting into the cash balance we expect to have at the end of the year, but we’ve tried to budget for unexpected things like that. You don’t want to wait until budget time to find things to have to cut.”

And while the overall price of oil has resulted in lower than expected revenues, those low prices may help make up the difference. The road department should have an excess of $100,000 left in its fuel budget at the end of the year, Lazarus said.

“The sheriff’s office and the road department are way under budget on their gas expenses,” he said. “We’ve asked the sheriff and the road department not to move that money around and spend it, because I want that money there so we can offset the loss of the severance tax.”

Murray said the rest of the county’s revenue numbers look good, and going into the budgeting cycle for next year he won’t budget nearly the amount of expected severance revenue.

“As bad as I would like to see (prices) go up, and as much as I hate to say it, lesson learned for me,” he said. “We are not very fat on our budgets anyway, and we don’t have a lot of fluff in anybody’s budget, so we will just need to buckle up for a year.”