The September 18th Pickens County BOC meeting didn’t go without excitement last week as the Board of Commissioners would change the Pickens County Millage rate from their previous Millage rollback rate of 6.72 to 7.22 Mill.Before the Pickens County Board of Commissioners would approve the half Mill increase at Thursday’s meeting, they would first have a public hearing, drawing nearly a full crowd that would raise many questions about why the half Mill increase was needed. At the beginning of the meeting, Pickens County Finance Director Faye Harvey would explain to the crowd why the County had seen the necessity to raise the Millage rate from its 6.72 % rollback rate to 7.22 %. Harvey would speak of the County’s diminishing tax levy, saying that the County’s total tax digest value had decreased a little over 18.3 million dollars from 2013 to 2014, with 4.7 million dollars of this going in real and personal property and 14.8 million dollars being in motor vehicles. Harvey said the cause of this decrease in property of motor vehicles went from $90 million in 2013 to almost $75 million in 2014 because of a new Title Ad Valorem Tax (TAVT) law that the Department of Revenue put into effect in March 2013, which causes tax payers to pay for their new car titles based on their cars equity tax on the total price of their vehicle. According to Harvey, the problem with this is that the tax will not go back in the County’s property being that the taxpayer only has to pay the tax whenever they first buy their vehicle, instead of when they have to purchase a new tag every year, which is decreasing much of the County’s money. Sadly, she expects this will keep going on for years to come, a problem that could hurt Pickens County’s taxpayers in the long run through increasing millage rates, if something is not done now.

Most of the questions that would come from the County’s citizens on Thursday, would be inline with citizen Steve Griffin’s question for the Commissioner, who complained during the hearing that this type of increase could have been avoided if the County had decided to make cuts in other places instead of raises taxes.

“The County hasn’t made the cuts over the years to justify having a tax increase when they are not doing their due diligence,” Griffin told FYN on Thursday. “If we don’t cut and overhead what we don’t need, the bottom line is you can’t justify raising taxes on people when you don’t have the money,” he also added.

Griffin of course was not alone as other citizens would also question the tax increase based on their opinions that the county now needed money in their savings based on over expenditures from years passed. Many of the questions of over expenditures are related to Pickens’ need to begin borrowing money just so that the County could pay off its tax levy from previous years. Pickens first began borrowing $6,000,000 a year in TAN (Tax Anticipation Note) notes in 2012 and has since continued this procedure in order to just be able to stay a float for things such as salaries in budget departments and the tax levy. However, while the County blames these types of loans on the need to control tax levy, citizens would not let the commissioners forget about the County’s high department salaries and also past events such as the necessity to spend $400,000 on the Young Life Settlement case in 2012 and the County’s decision to build a $1.9 million dollar community center in 2011.

Before any thing else could be said, Commissioner Chairman Jones would take full responsibility for the community center during the public hearing. “That was for the kids plain and simple..If anyone wants to blame anybody for that, they can talk to me,” said Jones about the decision.

As for this years decision to increase the Millage rate by half a Mill, Jones and the other commissioners seem to be standing on the ground that this increase will help the county from debt in budget cases in future years. “What we are trying to do is get rid of this TAN (Tax Anticipation Note) and build the County’s cash flow,” Jones told FYN after the meeting. “The County is not in bad shape, but the cash flow is what is killing us.”

Jones and the other commissioners are expecting an overall increase in revenue of $684,750 with $641,933 going in real and property tax because of the half a mill increase that the new 7.22 Mill rate will generate. Time will only tell if this will continue to help the County’s revenue in future years.