Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Making Bibb County Public Hearing that we call today.

Today is uh August the twenty-eighth, the time is approximately twelve o'clock.

I'd like to welcome everyone here today as well as in person and those of you that may be watching it away today.

Um, this is a public hearing that's required uh by the uh state of Georgia regarding uh taxes in every community, but particularly today we're talking about making Bibb County.

So I want to preface a few of my remarks before we start a brief uh presentation, and then we'll allow people that speak.

We've had two people that sign up, I think, to speak, uh, we'll allow them to speak regarding the budget.

And of course, we do have a another hearing at nine o'clock on Tuesday, September the first, and one at six oh one Tuesday, uh, September the first.

Um retax um determination in Georgia is not a very simple task for anyone.

Um, if you look if if you look at our tax codes and how things are assessed on values of properties and how each county or city is responsible for raising money, uh a lot of people can disagree um on the outcomes.

And it can be quite complicated.

Whether you're a state and legislature, who I talk so legislators I talk to all the time, whether you're a mayor of a city or a chairman of a city or a city councilman or a commissioner, everyone has uh different opinions, but unfortunately, um our opinions don't necessarily matter.

I can tell you my personal opinion is that the way things are taxed based on a value of your home to generate income would not be my preference.

Uh it's hard to me believe sometimes that just because your house is worth a certain amount and your neighbors may be worth a certain amount and you use the same services that you may pay a different amount than them.

I think most people would believe we call that common sense.

Unfortunately, that is the law.

Uh that is a law that state and legislature has enacted, and that is a law that Makin Bib County must follow, no matter what this mayor believes differently.

Uh at the same time, uh I have had problems in the past of realizing that my personal home has gone up in value several hundred thousand dollars without making any substantial improvements to my home.

Um I do understand that that the tax assessor is charged with a duty, and that duty is to evaluate homes based on what's required by the law, not by what we want, not by what they feel, uh, and maybe not by what you would think it would be, but they're charged to follow the law, and they have to do that as well.

Therefore, when they compare your property with someone else's property that just can built or remodeled or improved in some particular way, it does affect each and every one of our properties.

So we each have our duties and responsibility.

The tax assessor is charged by law to evaluate your property uh and to determine a fair market value of that property.

The tax commissioner is responsible for putting that into a formula between commercial, residential, agricultural, etc.

Uh, to determine what we call real growth.

Real growth would be something that you and I would use common sense to say that uh a new home being built or additions to a home, or perhaps like this year, many of you may not know uh we have a large employer coming back on the tax digest.

Uh PACTEV in the last year come back on the tax digest, and I believe the amount is around $32 million value.

Um, I looked at various news media articles in the last couple of days.

Uh sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes that's a bad thing.

Uh and if you read three different columns, you would come up with three different answers.

Uh I saw one that says Making Bibb County is keeping the miller's rate the same.

I saw another who, in my opinion, incorrectly said that making Bibb County has a nine percent tax increase for homeowners.

Uh, and I saw another one that says if you have a house that's worth this amount of money, uh, you receive this type of increase.

So that's why I say things can be complicated.

Um we are charged with setting the millage rate.

Uh, that is the third prong in this this situation here.

Uh, we set the millage rate, that is the tax rate.

So if we say the tax rate is the same as it was last year, we have not raised taxes or the tax rate, although your value may go up and you may pay more money.

In actuality, some people this year may pay more money, some people may pay the same as last year, and some people may pay less money than the previous year.

Makes perfect sense so far.

The other fallacy that I see in this is that we our tax digest uh represents about 50 percent commercial.

So if your tax digest has increased by nine percent and 50 percent of that is commercial, uh it cannot equate to nine percent of that being uh on residential property.

And the other part I would tell you is that there's only about sixteen million dollars of homestead property in Macon Bib County.

Um I know I'm talking a lot of numbers, but I think it's it's important to get an understanding of how these things work and we want citizens to be more educated on the process, and that's why we try to throughout the year uh educate them on different responsibilities from different departments.

Uh, this year, if you take the new value of the meal of approximately seven million dollars per one meal, uh, and you run it by the tax rate that we have right now of 9.575, you'll come up around 67 million dollars.

Uh 67 million dollars is substantially lower uh than what we were collecting several years ago uh in our community.

That is real proof that we are collecting less property taxes today than we collected just four or five years ago.

Simple math that most of us can understand.

Um you also understand that sixty-seven million dollars is all the property tax that theoretically would be uh collected based on commercial, agricultural, any property tax that we have value-wise, sixty-seven million dollars.

As you can imagine, that's not our entire budget.

So $67 million is only about $4 million more than the sheriff's budget.

So in theory, all the property taxes in Macon Bibb County that are collected barely covers the sheriff's budget only out of all the departments we have.

If you add the fire department budget to that, you get around $103 million.

Now I know you may be saying, well, I looked at your budget and your numbers don't reflect that.

Well, our actual budget numbers from previous year will reflect that.

So all the property taxes in Macon Bibb County do not even cover uh fire and police.

As many of you know, when we said this in our budget time uh earlier this year, about 57% of our budget is what we call public safety.

And we include the district attorney's office, the sheriff's office, all those departments uh into our public safety because we believe that they're public safety uh related.

So I said all that to say this is that today uh we're here for a hearing to to uh let you be heard, and next Tuesday we'll be voting on the millage rate, and our proposed budget that we did, uh our budget we passed was based on the assumption that we had a 9.575 millage rate, which means we would keep it the same.

Uh yes, we have cut every single year our tax rate from 2021 that you'll see up until now, uh, and this year we're gonna maintain that the same in order to make sure that we're able to pay our public safety.

Uh someone earlier reached out to me this week and said, Well, what are you gonna do with this extra money you're collecting?

It's not extra money for spending.