CLARKESVILLE — The Clarkesville City Council voted Monday night to hold the line on the city’s millage rate at 6.35 for another year.
“Once again, we experienced a decrease in the property tax digest this year – a little over 2 percent,” City Manager Barbara Kesler said. “But again, the council chose to keep the millage rate as it has been over the past 10 years so as not to increase the millage rate burden to any of the citizens.”
But holding the line on the millage rate didn’t come without sacrifices on the part of city government, specifically the police department.
“One of the big things that we had to do this year was we had to give up a position that we had previously budgeted for in the public safety department, which wasn’t really a very easy thing for us to do,” Kesler said.
That proposed position would have been an officer to oversee the department’s patrol division, while providing backup during busy times. Kesler said the position elimination will not affect any current employees.
“There’s no cut in the current staff that we have at all,” Kesler said. “It was a position that we had really hoped we could create to help out, especially during the times when we only have one person on the road during busy times, but we just had to make a decision.”
The 11.55-percent reduction in the police department budget through elimination of the position and associated costs was further necessitated by the city’s dwindling financial reserves resulting from rebuilding fire-damaged downtown buildings on the east side of the square.
“Obviously, we spent a good amount of our reserves on the rebuilding and we don’t have that money coming back in yet,” Kesler said. “We do project that it will probably not start coming back in until sometime in 2019 or 2020, so yes that does play a role in how conservative we’re going to be with our budget. Whereas, in years past the council might have been willing to dip into reserves to fund an extra position, we’re not as willing to do that at this point.”
The city will, however, be filling some vacant positions in other areas to take care of the city’s maintenance and upkeep needs.
“For the 2017 budget year, we had allowed some natural attrition in the public works departments to stay that way and had been down several people, and we found that we could not maintain our infrastructure without those people so we’re bringing those positions back in 2018 because we found we are getting behind maintaining our infrastructure, and we can’t let our infrastructure get behind in maintenance because it’s too valuable,” Kesler said.
The city's tax bills will be mailed later this week, and due by Jan. 30, 2018. The penalty date when interest will be charged was set for Jan. 31, 2018.
