It wasn't what anybody would call standing room only at the Dade Administrative Building Thursday night but for a county government meeting it wasn't a bad crowd. Perhaps 18 people turned out for the third and final public hearing on Dade's fiscal year 2019 millage rate, a better showing in any case than for either of the others, which both took place last Thursday.
Directly after the July 26 hearing, the Dade County Commission convened briefly for a special called meeting to adopt the millage rate. The rate remains the same for next year as this one--8.484 for the unincorporated county, 10.952 for within the city of Trenton.
Mitchell Smith, the District 1 commissioner who will voluntarily leave the commission after this year, voted no. Scottie Pittman, the District 2 commissioner who will involuntarily leave the commission this after this year--he lost Tuesday night's Republican primary runoff to challenger Phillip Hartline--was not present, out of town on a work assignment. The other commissioners voted yes.
The citizens who attended the hearing were cordial and curious, and it quickly emerged that most had showed up because of a misperception engendered by the wording of an advertisement in the print newspaper that the commission had raised the tax rate. County Clerk Don Townsend explained that the wording was dictated by the state of Georgia under the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. "We can't change the words at all," he said.
Well, said one citizen, "The people don't understand it."
"And they never will," sighed the long-suffering Townsend. "I don't understand it and I've worked here 12 years."
He explained as he often has, and The Planet will repeat, as The Planet often does, this year's situation: The tax rate is staying the same, but the tax digest--the total base amount of property value against which the rate is multiplied--has gotten slightly larger, so that the county government expects to collect slightly more property tax. With a steep health insurance hike on employees in every department, the county government badly needs the money and in fact had to dip into its reserves to cover this year's budget. Thus it decided to "accept the growth" in the digest rather than "rolling back" the millage rate to reduce expected revenues. This the Taxpayer Bill of Rights requires the county to advertise as a 4.4 percent tax increase in a strictly-worded ad in the county organ.
Wait, said another citizen: So you have to run the ad, fine; but can't you also run another one beside it explaining the situation in words people could understand?
Nope, said Townsend, he'd tried that last week. This week, the Georgia Department of Revenue had given him explicit instructions on what to do and given him to understand if he did anything more, less or other, Dade's millage rate would not be certified. "We can't get around it," he said.
Other questions were about the previously announced valuation boost for houses with vinyl or aluminum siding. How much of the tax digest increase was because of that?
Townsend didn't know, and Chief Appraiser Paula Duvall had not as planned attended the hearing, but Townsend volunteered that his house had been revalued at $19,600 more, or would have had he not taken advantage of one of the tax freezes still available on Dade's books for homestead properties. (Link to information on that: http://www.dadecounty-ga.gov/155/Homestead-Exemptions)
Other questions veered a little off the subject at hand. "Do we have to have this reservoir?" asked one citizen, referring to the county commission's much-discussed initiative to buy acreage off Lookout Creek for the eventual purpose of building a dam and reservoir on it.
"It's not the law, no," said Ted Rumley (pictured above gesticulating), executive chairman of the commission.
He went over the history, how the Dade Water Authority had wanted the Lookout Creek acreage since it determined around the 1980s a reservoir was the best way to ensure water supply for the long run, but that the Sells family had farmed the land for generations and had not chosen to part with it until last year. "Do we need it today?" said Rumley. "We're doing OK until we have a drought. This is for the future."
Another citizen said he'd found a dead cow in the creek and had reported it to law enforcement. Wandering still further off the millage path, he said he'd asked the game warden why the creek wasn't stocked with trout and the game warden had told him Lookout Creek was too polluted to sustain them.
Rumley said the creek was the wrong temperature for trout but defended its cleanliness. Yes, there are farms around it, he said, but: "It's one of the cleanest for its size in this part of the South."
What effect, asked another citizen, had the recent failure of TSPLOST (the proposed transportation special purpose local option sales tax, which was defeated in a May 22 referendum, had on this year's taxes?
None, said Rumley, except that if it had passed, the commission could have lowered taxes. "We'd have given it back as a property tax rollback," he said.
Rumley bemoaned the low turnout in the May 22 primary and in this week's primary runoff. Around 2000 voted in the primary and around 1000 in the runoff, he said. That's out of Dade's over 10,000 registered voters. "People don't vote like they used to," he said.
Another question was about the Dade school board, which had in fact rolled back taxes this year. "They have a surplus of money," answered Rumley. He explained that 70 percent of Dade property tax goes to the Board of Education. "We get the other percentage to run the county," he said.
Which seems a good place to end this account. The Dade B of E will have a special called meeting this Monday, July 30, at 6 p.m. to adopt its own rolled-back millage rate of 15.070, after which it will present the same to the Dade County Commission for formalization and collection at the county commission's regular monthly meeting Aug. 4.
This will conclude this year's unusually long and hiccup-filled budget process and as Clerk Townsend pointed out, it will also conclude two solid months of Thursday nights at the Administrative Building for himself, the commission and let us please not forget The Dade Planet, ever on hand like the Moving Finger to write up the news for you, the concerned citizen; but which now, having writ, moves on.
Comments