The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
DLGF Certified Budget Orders, St. Joseph County, 9 January 2023 and 10 January 2025, unit 0861 (the 2025 order read in Pass IV-2; the course carried whole in the events file)
Test one — documented: PASS. The course stands in the state's own orders, the strongest class this section admits. The 2023 order prints that the town's appropriations "were restricted to the prior year total because the budget was not properly appropriated," with two funds further noting the unit "failed to provide verification of 06/30 cash and appropriation balances" — over a unit total of $36,100, levy $0. The 2025 order prints under every fund of unit 0861 the sentence "The total appropriations were restricted to the prior year total because of improper advertising," over a certified budget of $37,100 on an assessed value of $10,642,609, levy $0 and rate $0.0000 throughout. The underlying course — the orders, the funds, the figures, and the open question of the 2026 order — is owned by the events and government files and is cross-pointed, not retold, here.
Test two — genuinely contested: FAIL. No charge and no defense stand in any carrier reached. A DLGF restriction is a compliance act of the state against a filing, not an accusation against a person: the orders name no officer, allege no misconduct, and state no penalty beyond the restriction itself. No appeal, objection, public dispute, press controversy, or town response of any kind was found in any carrier searched — no article in the paper of record, no opinion, no filing — and the town's own record, so far as any carrier reaches it, simply continues: budgets advertised, hearings held, the 2027 cycle run on the same course, with the town's first proposed levy above zero ($452) advertised in October 2026 without any carrier treating it as a sequel to a fight. A restriction that nobody is recorded as disputing is a fact of administration. It is not a controversy, and this section will not style it one.
Test three — town-significant: FAIL, at the discipline's own measure. The restriction changed no office (the town's officers continue on the roster and the examination schedules without interruption on any carrier reached), no policy (the town levied $0 before the restriction and $0 under it; its budget continued at the prior year's total, which for a $37,100 budget is the ordinary course of the town), no building, and no standing that any carrier records. Disposition of the candidate: fails tests two and three; it does not enter this section as a controversy. It stands in this build where it belongs — as a documented episode of the town's fiscal course, in the events file, at full strength — and any future carrier that documents a dispute over it (a town appeal, a contested hearing, an official finding against a named officer) reopens the candidate on that carrier, with the tests rerun whole.