Local & State Headlines

DoCo millage rate to drop

• The Dougherty County Commission’s Finance Committee finds an additional $1.8 million in taxpayer relief.

Carlton Fletcher

ALBANY — The Finance Committee of the Dougherty County Commission took a little here, added a little there and came away with a 1.25-mill decrease in the county’s fiscal year 2008 tax millage rate, chopping an additional half-mill off a budget they’d adopted only four months earlier.

The committee later recommended to the entire commission that the budget be revised to account for additional cuts in the millage rate, a proposal that was passed unanimously.

“Budgeting is not a science; it’s a moving target,” County Administrator Richard Crowdis said during the early-morning Finance Committee meeting.

And the committee took aim at the target in an effort to provide tax relief for citizens hit with the first countywide tax revaluation in some 44 years. They voted to cut $900,000 in proposed increases from the general fund maintenance and operations budget and add another $900,000 in reserve funds to reduce property taxes by a total of $1.8 million.

That amount allowed the committee to lop another half-mill off the proposed 3/4-mill rollback the commission had previously proposed. The new $46,529,000 budget represents a 4.59 percent increase over the FY 2007 budget and a millage rollback from 13.147 to 11.397.

The vote came a week after the third of three public hearings during which angry taxpayers bombarded the commission with complaints.

“We definitely got input from the public: at the grocery store, at the gas station and everywhere else folks ran into us,” Finance Committee Chairman Lamar Hudgins said after the meeting. “This has been on people’s minds, and that’s understandable. A home is one of the largest investments people make, and they want to see the value of that investment appreciate.

“We certainly took the feedback we got from the public into consideration, but our work on the budget is an ongoing process. If we see something wrong, like a decrease in tax collections, we make adjustments (with the budget) at any time.”

Committee member Chuck Lingle said the public outcry actually had little impact on the budget adjustment.

“This was certainly not a knee-jerk reaction,” he said. “We’d been planning from day 1 to try and (reduce) the millage rate by 1 mill; we simply found another quarter-mill in reductions.

“We don’t react until the facts are known as well as possible. We still have a moving (tax) digest to contend with. We may run and jump in here, have a good time when we’re together, but when it comes to matters this important we don’t play.”

In addition to making small cuts in each area of expenditures and moving additional funds from reserves, the Finance Committee voted to take $100,000 from the county’s workers compensation contribution and $800,000 from a partial pay plan salary increase.

“We thought we’d need another $100,000 in workers compensation funds, but we now think the funds we have on the books ($700,000) will be sufficient,” Crowdis said. “With the removal of the (pay-plan funds), we’ll take a look at future options.”

Before offering a motion to recommend the 1.25-mill rollback, Lingle asked Crowdis, “If we adopt this (plan), is that fiscally responsible?”

“Yes, our staff feels we can live within this budget,” the county administrator replied.

The committee also recommended — and the commission later approved — an additional half-mill rollback (a total of 1.75 mills to 7.275) in the county’s special tax district.

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