Heading into the new year, Whitfield County Board of Commissioners Chairman Jevin Jensen said one of the biggest financial matters for the local government will be what it isn’t spending money on.
“A lot of people don’t realize that just three years ago, we had $30 million in debt,” he said. “We’ve been able to pay those down through COVID and as the economy and the revenues have increased, that is down to $8.1 million today.”
By the end of 2024, Jensen said he expects the debt to be below the $1.5 million mark.
“That, I think, really has improved our stability,” he said. “At the same time, we’ve increased the rainy day fund, what they call the fund balance, to over $30 million for the first time. So that ratio of, basically, cash to debt has really done a complete reversal and is a much more positive and stronger financial position for the county.”
Surging interest rates may be a headache for consumers, Jensen said. But they’ve been a boon to the local government.
“From the county’s perspective, when you have cash and you can invest it at 5%, we’re expecting to get over $1 million in interest,” he said, “which that’s revenue and tax dollars we don’t have to take from the citizens, we can take it from the bank instead.”
As for where that interest income is being allocated, Jensen said the county government has moved it into the general fund.
“Nothing in particular,” he said. “It’s typically salaries … we had to re-do the starting salaries for some of those departments that we just were not getting any applicants for.”
Reflecting on FY (fiscal year) 2023, Jensen said the county’s actuals came within 1% of its forecasts.
“But when you compare that to the budget, it looks like there was this large increase over in 2024,” he said. “That’s because we’ve finally gotten to fill these open head counts, where it was so difficult to find people to work in our sheriff’s office and in our jails and in our fire department, even in our public works — all of those departments were really hard to recruit for two years ago.”
On the doorstep of 2024, Jensen said the county government is now approaching full employment.
“It’s the same head count we always had, but as opposed to just having these open jobs posted on the website and human resources for months and months on end, now they’re actually people there that can provide services to our citizens,” he said. “We really didn’t add any people, but it looks like ‘Oh, the salaries are way up’ … we’ve got just a couple of open head counts where, before, we would have 15-20 people that we were looking for and just no applicants for those positions.”
With FY ‘23 accounting wrapping up, Jensen said the county government’s fund balance reserves exceed the best practices of entities such as the Association County Commissioners of Georgia and the Georgia Municipal Association.
“They both recommend around six months,” Jensen said. “We’re above the six-month limit recommendation, so we don’t really see a need to keep it that high. So we want to give that back to the taxpayers — that’s what we’ve been doing with the millage rate cut for the last four years in a row, beyond just the rollbacks.”
At the end of October, the county reported a roughly $4 million surplus.
“Now, we have to pay off some healthcare bills because we’re self-insured,” Jensen said. “So we took that action on the budget to do a budget amendment to pay off the little over $1 million of healthcare balance that we owed.”
Once FY ‘23 comes to a close, Jensen projected the county surplus to be in the $2.5 million to $3 million range.
The senior tax exemptions approved by Whitfield County voters in November, he said, serve as wildcards for FY ‘24 projections.
As an estimate, Jensen said the overall impact could be about $1.9 million in fewer taxes collected.
“But we’ve got a lot of these multifamily homes, apartment buildings that are going up that, hopefully, will be online and count towards our digest in 2024,” Jensen said. “We know we’ve got several hundred new homes that weren’t taxed at all in 2023, so that should offset a good percentage of that — we just don’t know exactly how much until we get into April and May. But we’re guessing there will still be about a $600,000 delta there.”
As for what could make up that more than half a million dollar differential, Jensen said revenues derived from interest and sales tax are the most likely income streams.
Jensen said the county accumulated about $7.6 million in grants for 2023.
“This does not include American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds that all counties received,” he noted. “This is up less than $1 million than in 2020 and an essential element to keep taxes low while investing in our community to continue moving forward.”
From the outset, Jensen said the county government avoided spending those federal dollars on investments that would require long-term staffing or maintenance costs.
“The only staff person we hired using ARPA money was literally our grants administrator,” he said. “We can more than pay for her ongoing salary going forward.”
As of October, the county’s Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) collections stood at about $12.7 million — a roughly 6.5% increase over the figures from a year earlier.
“It also helps the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) revenue,” Jensen said. “That’s going to allow us to do some of these investments in the roads, in the bridges, in the infrastructure … 87% of that money is going towards safety, whether it be the jail, the sheriff’s office or public works.”
Still, Jensen said the county government is taking a conservative stance on projected LOST collections in FY ‘24.
“Basically, just a 2% or 3% increase in the LOST for the general fund budget,” he said.
In May, residents will vote whether or not to approve another round of SPLOST for an additional four-year period.
“This particular one, we’ve agreed not to borrow any funds — not to pay in advance to do these projects,” Jensen said. “We want to do the replacement of the (public safety) radios, we want to continue with the heating and cooling replacements for these 20- and 25-year-old systems in the jail … we’re putting a new roof on our jail to protect against mold and leakage and make it better insulated, we don’t want to get into a situation like Fulton County where they’re getting sued and they’re having to have hundreds of millions of investments in their jail.”
And if voters turn down the proposed 1% sales tax ballot item?
“We’ll have to just kind of pay as we go, it might make it tougher to pull those capital projects off of the SPLOST and put them into the general fund,” Jensen said. “I guess the concern would be, like on the bridges, we want to meet the state’s new weight limits … we want to make sure they’re safe for buses, for the school system and just regular business and commuter traffic.”
The list of potential SPLOST-funded projects, countywide, carries a roughly $80 million price tag. Of that amount, Jensen said roughly 13% of the possible projects are related to recreation.
“Of course, that’s optional, so we would just drop that,” he said. “And the veterans’ memorial, that could wait.”
Jensen said he was aware of at least four bridges within the community in need of millions of dollars in remediation.
“That’s what keeps me up at night, I want to make sure every one of the bridges doesn’t just pass inspection but has a 10- or 20-year life span,” he said. “So we would have to research how to fund that, some kind of way, I’m not sure what the answer is — that’s kind of mission critical.”