Year in Review: Franklin County Works Out Plan to Pay Hospital Bond Debt

As the sale of Ty Cobb Regional to St. Mary’s progressed, Franklin County began preparing for how they were going to pay the outstanding hospital bond debt.

In late 2014, Ty Cobb Healthcare announced it could no longer afford to make the twice yearly bond payments of $311,000 each, leaving the County holding the bag.

In May, Jim Pannell, of the law firm Gray, Pannell & Woodward LLC in Savannah offered Franklin County Commissioners two options for raising the capital needed to make those payments .

One, he said, would be to get voter approval to refinance the $8.5 million bond issue.

But the best way, Pannell said would be to get voter approval to begin the next SPLOST a year early and use the penny sales tax to repay the debt.

Work on putting together a SPLOST referendum began in early summer and by September, County Manager Beth Thomas presented the Board of Commissioners with two referendums to approve for the November ballot.

“The Board of Commissioners must vote to approve a resolution that will call for the Referendum in November,” she explained in September. “These votes have to happen in a certain time order so the notice of election must go to the Board of Elections in time for them to process it and send it off to Kennesaw State to build the ballots. The advice given to us by our bond attorney was that we get this done by September 4th.”

And in November, voters did approve both the early SPLOST referendum and the debt refinancing plan.

After the vote, Commission Chair Thomas Bridges called the passage of both referendums a good day for the Citizens of Franklin County.

“It takes off a lot of pressure regarding how we’re going to fund projects,” he said. “We can move forward with confidence that we can pay for the capital outlay and move forward with the projects by continuing the SPLOST.”
Some of the main SPLOST projects the County is hoping to get done over the next six years include road work.
Bridges said the County plans to focus on one particular road near Franklin County Middle School.
“Taking care of Turkey Creek Road by the middle school is a top priority,” Thomas said. “The road is too narrow for the traffic and the school buses. So that’s going to be a priority to get that project completed.”
According to Thomas, current payments on the Hospital Authority Certificates are approximately $625,000 per year through 2040.