Hart County BOC Views Preliminary FY14 Budget
Hart County’s Board of Commissioners has approved a spending resolution allowing the county to operate without a new budget past the start of the new fiscal year, which begins today.
At their regular meeting last week, county administrator Jon Caime presented the board with the preliminary FY14 budget numbers. Caime said the county is still short about $300-thousand dollars from having a balanced budget.
Total expected General Fund Expenses for FY14 is $9.7 million with department requests totaling $11 million.
Total expected General Fund Revenue for FY14 is $9.4 million, but Caime said the big unknown remains how much revenue the county will actually collect once the final tax bills for 2009-2011 actually go out.
“This thing with nine, ten, eleven, it’s still bouncing around,” Caime said. “We’re not really sure where we are with nine, ten, eleven yet. As you know, we still have to final bill on nine, ten, eleven. We’ve already set the final millages for nine, ten, eleven and of course we set the temporary millages when we bill back in each one of those tax years and collected taxes. So now it’s a matter of doing the final billing on nine, ten, and eleven.”
After that, the county will then send out the final tax bills for 2012 and 2013, which will bring them current on their property tax billing.
Recently, Caime said the county and the Hart County school system were sending out a total of $5.9 million in tax bills but also had to send out about $4 million in refunds from the temporary billings sent out earlier for 2009-2011.
Now he said new figures from the Board of Tax Assessors has widened that gap and lowered the refund amount to just over $2 million.
“It’s now about $5.3 million in bills and I think about $2.7 million in refunds, which is a good indication that more than likely we’re gonna collect all the money we need to pay the refunds. And then we’re also going to have money coming in to cover some of these deficits we’ve run in the past several years,” Caime said.
Caime said the county has depleted most of its reserve fund in recent years to cover expenses without raising the millage, but he said the county cannot do that again this next fiscal year.
Earlier, Caime had indicated the county must come up with about $200,000 to hire an additional six-man crew for the county EMS and another full-time worker for the county Road Department.
Caime said last week that he has recommended the board hire the six-man EMS crew over a two year period; three this fiscal year and three in FY15.
A public hearing will be held during the regularly scheduled meeting of the Hart County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday, October 8, at 5:30 p.m.
The board is expected to pass the FY 14 budget at their regular meeting on October 22nd.