With the Putnam County Board of Commissioners set to finalize its 2023-24 general fund budget a couple of weeks from now, at least one confounding question lingers: with the county’s tax digest up 20 percent, why do extra revenues from that growth not eliminate any need for an additional millage rate increase, the first in six years?
The short answer? It’s the state’s oft-cited – and just as often ill-understood – “rollback rate.” In other words, there is no automatic 20-percent increase in property tax revenues.
Georgia’s departments of Revenue and of Audits compare sales ratio studies to data submitted by local entities to determine if local digests were actually too low. If so, and after meeting certain thresholds, the state departments issue a target “rollback rate” which involves advertising a potential millage rate increase, plus penalties.
Putnam County’s commission and school board both received such notices this year. After years of compliance, the three-year bulge in property sales growth finally caught up with them.
“We will only get to keep about $300,000” of the growth revenues without a millage rate increase on the remaining $1 million needed to balance this proposed budget,” Putnam County Manager Paul Van Haute explained. “That’s a real simplistic summary,” he added.
“Inflation is what is killing us,” Van Haute said. Examples include 6 percent cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for about 300 employees, six new county positions, and $200,000 in property and health insurance hikes, not to mention higher costs for capital items like ambulances and trucks.
At least one commissioner, District 2’s Daniel Brown, has already publicly advocated for restoring requests from the hospital and Putnam Development Authority that Van Haute had lowered or eliminated in his proposed budget.
One counterbalance to the choice between budget cuts and a millage rate increase came from the hope that the county’s recent beefing up of the fire department would see results in an ISO (Insurance Services Office) evaluation scheduled later in the year.
With the bulk of the unincorporated area currently carrying fire insurance ratings between 5 and 9, the hope is that lower ratings would bring homeowners’ fire insurance costs down.
At last week’s budget and millage rate hearings, former commission chairman Billy Webster again pressed for dipping into the county’s $10 million fund balance, plus some nibbling at every line item in the proposed budget.