On Tuesday last week, the Putnam County Board of Commissioners (BOC) postponed to September the schedule for a new short-term rentals ordinance, and with little comment approved forwarding to Eatonton City Council a new batch of de-annexation requests.
The six packages of de-annexation requests would potentially remove more than 1,500 acres from city jurisdiction, its services – and its taxes. The 33 parcels in the six packages carry fair market values – which differ from taxable values – of more than $10 million, according to documents filed with the requests.
Like the first two batches of requests, virtually all the parcels in the new requests involve active or inactive family farms more than a mile from the courthouse. All are locally owned or have local family ties. Several of the parcels were clearly cut out of a family farm for their children, usually one to five acres.
The acreages in the current requests range from one acre to 328 acres, with residences involved in 11 of the 33 parcels.
The tax-reducing conservation-use exemption is already in place for another 16 of the 33 parcels. The conservation- use exemption can apply to cultivated land, fallow land, pastures, and woodlands. It locks in taxable values for 10-year periods, with penalties for any early sales.
Unlike the first two batches of requests, which focused on properties on the eastern side of the city in an arc between Lower Harmony Road and Martin Luther King Drive with Greensboro Highway in the middle, the current requests come from other sectors as well – three clusters of family properties just west of the bypass on Church Street and Glenwood Springs Road, three wooded properties off Ted Dunn Boulevard near the South Industrial Park, plus more holdings to the east of Lower Harmony Road, Oconee Springs Road, and Sparta Highway.
Family members of District 1 County Commissioner Gary McElhenney formed one request for five parcels on Church Street.
McElhenney abstained from voting on this particular package.
The filer with the largest number of parcels, as well as the largest acreage, is Dwain Sammons, who now lives in Tennille but grew up in Eatonton. Sammons filed for 11 properties totaling 604 acres.
As for the short-term rentals ordinance, the requirements for legal advertising on the public hearing pushed the hearing into the first Friday morning of September, with possible consideration for passage at the commission’s Sept.
19 mid-month evening meeting. A second proposed version of the ordinance is available by request through Commission Clerk Lynn Butterworth and also online at putnamcountyga.us.
At last week’s meeting, two owners who rented out their properties for short terms pointed out several problems and suggested changes to the proposed ordinance.
Matthew Trial said it had been a “big financial decision” to purchase a Lake Sinclair house on March 1, this year.
“I don’t want to run it as a business, but we need to supplement our income while we are paying mortgages on two houses,” he said.
Ken Colson, who works with Lake Oconee properties, asked for “more details” and suggested the addition of “per floor” to the capacity number of two people per bedroom, plus two.
He asked how children should be counted and whether the proposed ordinances regarding parking restrictions also applied to non-STR properties.
Also relating to capacity, Colson suggested the maximum number of people allowed in the house at any time be changed to add a temporary 50 percent to the number of overnight guests allowed.
In other actions, the commission sent three names – Georgia Smith, Marilyn Simon, and Richard Garrett – to the hospital authority to choose one for an expired seat on the authority board.
And after the local Democratic party did not meet the deadline for submitting its nomination for one of the seats on the county Board of Elections, that board’s chair, Republican Charles Patten, recommended, and the all-Republican Board of Commissioners approved, the re-appointment of Emory Walden to the elections board.