Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the Make and Bib County Commission public hearing.

If you were going to speak, you should have already signed up for this hearing.

Or if you're just arriving there at the last minute, go ahead and uh get that form filled out, please.

I'd officially call this uh public hearing to order.

You know, as you know, this is our second public hearing.

We'll have another one this afternoon, and we'll have another one uh next week prior to our voting on our uh millage rate, uh setting the price for that.

We'll go over just a few things before we have a slight presentation for you, our small presentation for you, uh, like we did the last hearing.

Uh just as a reminder, I want to let people know that our what our responsibilities are.

Uh first of all, uh this is Make and Bib County government, as you realize this is a separate tax and uh entity from the Macin Bib County school system, therefore they have their own public hearings uh and their own budgets, and so does Make and Bib County, we're separate legal taxing authorities.

Uh so uh second of all, we want to let you know that we are setting the millage rate, that is the tax rate.

Uh the millage rate is what the government charges us, the state government charges us with setting based on our tax digest to determine uh the the amount of property taxes that we collect.

Uh as we mentioned before, uh we have either reduced uh actually we've reduced every year for the last several years the millage rate or keeping it the same.

Uh we have not raised and do not intend to raise uh the millage rate rate, which is uh us raising taxes.

As you know, the uh tax assessor is charged by the state uh with rules and regulations to set the values of properties, those values of properties are set up by law, and that's their uh lane, and sometimes their property values go up, sometimes they stay the same, and sometimes they go down.

So, as you can imagine, when you have a fixed rate uh that these the county or the school system set, if your value of your house goes up, you could pay more.

If it goes down, you will pay less.

So if it stays the same, you will pay exactly the same.

As mentioned before, our um tax digest has steadily grown.

A lot of that's because we've had real growth in the community, and we have some of our companies coming back onto the tax digest.

Over about 50 percent of our tax digest uh is commercial in nature, so those are not homeowners.

Uh, another fun fact if we can save fund in the same sentence when we're talking about millage rate, is that um the homeowners of Make and Bib County uh represent only seven percent of the budget for the county, but roughly a 220 million, 21 million dollar budget.

Uh the homeowners in Make and Bib County's uh property taxes are right at 16 million dollars, uh so that's about a seven percent uh of the entire budget, which is a very small amount, of course, just a big amount for those of us who pay that.

So um and finally, uh we're required to have these hearings because we're keeping the millage rate the same, and that's what we're doing.

And as we told you before, uh the majority of our budget, 57 percent is public safety related.

Uh we have can continue to increase that, and we'll go over those numbers if we'll pull that uh presentation up.

There we go.

So we're just gonna give you a brief history.

Uh, as you can tell in 2021, uh uh this local government here set the millage rate or had a millage rate set.

Actually, most folks were coming in around that time of 20.331.

Um in 2022, we had a millage rate of 9.901.

We rolled that back.

In 2023, 17.9, 2024, 10.7, 2025, 9.9, and in 2026, we had a millage rate of 9.575.

When we did our budget and passed our budget just a couple of months ago, uh, increasing items such as public safety, uh, we informed the public at that time that we would be keeping the millage rate uh the same.

We're waiting on the tax digest.

So that's where we're at today, a 9.575 millage rate, and you can do the math yourself to see that that's well over uh cutting the millage rate in half, which is what we're charged to do.

Next slide.

This just tells you basically what we consider public safety.

Uh the fire of the sheriff EMA code enforcement, the courts, and the corner.

Uh you add those items up, you can see in 2021 we had a total uh expense of 94 million dollars.

And in 2025, you can see that our budget for public safety is 125 million dollars.

Did I say 94 million?

Uh 125 million dollars.

Um one year change of 3.5 million dollars, but over a period of six years, 31 million dollars.

And we pay that each and every year.

It's not just a uh charge across that.

So um we are putting our money where our mouth is in public safety, and public safety uh continues to be a priority that the uh citizens of Make and Bib County have told us they wanted to do.

And if you ask what we're doing with this money and how we're spending the money, then this is what we're spending it on it, and that is certainly proof of that.

Next slide.

Uh information technology, uh you can see that we've increased that over six years of 3.8 million dollars.

Recreation is something we've increased by 3.3 million dollars, and beautification 1.882 million dollars.

I also want to point out that if you're talking about property taxes, and we hear this all the time as mayor and commissioners, um people often allege that uh the government is simply just raising the value of the property to collect more money.

Uh and that may be true in other places, but in making bib county, the the numbers don't lie themselves.

So you're you can look up the amount of money that uh this local government has taken uh received from the property tax owners and all taxes actually uh over the last several years, and what you'll notice is that um the local government used to get collect somewhere almost between 90 uh a little bit over 90 million dollars in local property taxes.

Uh this year with the new uh millage rate remaining the same, we're at about 67 million dollars uh from total property taxes.

Keep in mind only 16 of that comes from homeowners.

So you can see uh that we're somewhere around 20, 30 million dollars.

We're collecting less than we did several years ago, therefore there's no increase in the amount of money that we did just because of property values.

Next slide.

So these are some of the hearing dates that we talked to you about just a moment ago.