When it comes to getting money from Beaufort County to help pay for city services, facilities and programs used by county residents who don’t live in the city, Washington officials are persistent in such requests.

During the council’s retreat Saturday, that issue surfaced again. For years, city officials have been trying to persuade the county to help pay for city services used mostly by non-city residents who live in the county. They’ve had little success.

Facing a loss of about $160,000 revenue in its upcoming 2017-2018 budget because the county is cancelling its EMS-coverage contract between the city and county and other revenue shortfalls, city officials contend that if the county paid its fair share to help run the city facilities, programs and services used by county residents outside the city, that incoming revenue would be welcomed.

“If they’d step up to the plate a little bit, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” Mayor Mac Hodges said at the retreat.

During a discussion about improving communications with area elected bodies and others, Councilman Doug Mercer said, “We’ve got to open those doors of communication, particularly with us and the county because as we all know in here, and I think everybody realizes it, the city is providing substantial services to county residents, and we’re not being paid for it. … We’ve got a pool; we’ve got a library; we’ve got a senior center. Over half the participation is from non-city residents. We’ve either got to find a way to have the county participate on funding those activities or we’ve got to find a way to generate revenue from those non-residents to pay for those services.”

Mercer continued: “You start talking about raising the fees at the pool for non-residents or the senior center for non-residents, we can fill City Hall. I don’t know how we’re going to address that. It’s an item that needs a great deal of attention from us and the county.”

Last year, the city made a formal request for county money to help pay for some of the city services used by county residents who do not live in the city and pay city taxes to support those services. The city asked for a little more than $1.3 million help pay for operating the city-owned Brown Library, the city-run Grace Harwell Martin Senior Center, the city-run Hildred T. Moore Aquatic Center and the city’s recreation facilities.

The breakdown of the request was $539,488 for recreation facilities, $357,263 for the aquatic center, $293,822 for the library and $132,917 for the senior center.

Data contained in the forms indicate that more Beaufort County residents who are not city residents used the library, senior center, aquatics center and recreation facilities than Washington residents in recent years. According to one of the forms, during the 2014-2015 fiscal year, 2,070 people used the senior center, with 850 of them living in the city, 1,113 of them living in the county but outside the city and the remaining 107 people lived outside the county. That means 53.7 percent of people who used the senior center lived in the county but not in the city.

In its current budget, the county allocated $20,000 to the city for parks and recreation, $20,000 to the senior center and $7,800 to Brown Library (the city contributes the same amount to the Beaufort-Hyde-Martin Regional Library).