Major tax hike averted; error in data found and leads to budget solution; ...

There are 1,425 assessment appeals still outstanding that could cause the digest to lose more value, but a $600,000 cushion built into the budget would soften any impact of those appeals.

What this means is that the BOC at its called meeting on Monday could adopt the rollback tax rate and balance the budget without having to declare a tax increase.

As Kisaalita explained to the BOC in her email: “The state does not consider a roll back as a tax increase. Therefore with a roll back, the Board will not have to have a vote on the tentative tax increase, and the county will not have to advertise for a tax increase nor for a tax public hearing. With this, the only public hearing that will be required is the one for the budget. On the digest, the percentage increase will show a zero.”

Kisaalita said Tax Commissioner Melinda Williams had clarified that she expects to collect about $17 million in revenues in FY2012 – not the $15 million in the Finance Department's earlier revenue figures – and she expects to collect close to 100 percent of those revenues rather than the 94.3 percent previously assumed.

Williams told the Barrow Journal on Friday that her office has collected 94.5 percent of the property tax revenues from bills sent out last fall. She expects to collect almost all of the unpaid taxes after she notifies delinquent taxpayers in a couple of weeks that she is preparing to take their properties to tax sales.

In her email to the BOC, Kisaalita laid out the following three options for the commissioners to consider at Monday’s 3 p.m. meeting:

• Option A, which would leave unchanged the earlier revenue projection and a projected budget shortfall of $2.9 million.

• Option B, which takes into account the new revenue projection as well as use of the rollback tax rate of 10.930 mills for everywhere other than Winder, whose rate would be 8.708 mills due to its additional fire tax. That option would generate a budget surplus of $111,531.

• Option C, which continues to assume that the tax commissioner would not collect more than 94.38 percent of the taxes billed. That option would result in a deficit of $1,683,069 ¬– and require about a half-mill rate increase above the rollback rate.

Commissioner Steve Worley, who met with both Kisaalita and Williams on Friday to address questions raised by the newspaper, told the BOC that he recommends Option B.

“This would balance the budget and not raise taxes, which is what everyone has been working toward,” Worley said.

He acknowledged that his focus during the budget committee’s meetings was mainly on reducing the costs of operations, and he pledged to learn more about the revenue side of future spending plans.

“If anything I have done while working on the 2012 Budget has caused confusion and problems, because of me not knowing enough about the revenue side, I sincerely apologize,” Worley wrote.

In his email, Worley thanked the tax commissioner for educating him about the rollback millage rates, the CFO and others for their hard work, and the Barrow Journal’s reporter “who kept asking the right questions…”