Habersham County Vice-Chairman Bruce Harkness and County Manager Alicia Vaughn held the State of the County Address Tuesday night, where they addressed the current status of county projects and answered questions from citizens.
At the center of the presentation was a discussion of the county’s SPLOST projects, as well as one project that’s not covered in SPLOST: the county jail.
SPLOST
The current SPLOST is estimated to bring in $47.1 million in tax revenue, and Vaughn says right now SPLOST collections are bringing in more than $700,000 a month. She says those collections are coming in over what they had estimated and believes that the county may bring in an additional $8 million to $10 million of SPLOST funds.
“We want to thank all of you who vote for that,” Vaughn said. “That’s a very important source of revenue to the county, that pays for a lot of really important capital projects.”
The county is focusing on four major SPLOST projects at this time, which includes improvements to the Habersham County Courthouse, the new 911 radio system, the Habersham County Emergency Services (HCES) central station in Demorest and the Habersham County Animal Shelter.
Other SPLOST funds go towards public safety vehicles and road maintenance.
Harkness gave an overview of the progress of those current projects, saying that installation of the new 911 towers and groundbreaking on the new animal shelter are both scheduled to happen this year.
The 911 radio project will bring the county 95 percent coverage for the emergency radio system, and Vaughn is hopeful the system will go from being a county system to a regional system.
“It’s our hopes that this could end up one day being more of a regional system,” Vaughn said. “There’s a lot of potential for surrounding counties to join this system. Every time someone joins into the system it helps keep our cost low because we share the operating costs with other people.”
The 911 radio system ties in with the plans for a new HCES central station in Demorest, which Harkness says will be the “top” emergency services facility in North Georgia, “if not the state.”
The station will be multi-purpose, housing HCES staff, the E-911 center, and serving as a centralized station in the county for fire and emergency medical services to access the county.
“In my opinion, it’s going to be one of the best things Habersham County has done in 50 years, or in my lifetime,” Harkness said. “I really believe that this is one of the best things that the taxpayers approved.”
While the station will be covered almost completely by SPLOST funds, some American Rescue Plan funds will be used to cover outstanding costs that the SPLOST budget did not.
The new Habersham County Animal Shelter, a highly-anticipated SPLOST project, is on track according to Harkness.
“This is going to be a state-of-the-art animal shelter,” Harkness said. “It is out for architect design right now, that should take about 60 days to approve the architect, we hope to break ground this year.”
The project is estimated to cost around $2 million, covered by SPLOST funds.
Questions continue about county jail
Citizens continue to ask further questions surrounding the Habersham County Jail after the sheriff’s office shared their need for a new jail and proposed a jail bond referendum during the 2019 county and municipal elections. That referendum failed to pass a vote on account of property taxes being raised to fund the new jail.
But citizens haven’t forgotten, and the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office says that the new jail is still needed. A citizen asked Harkness and Vaughn during the question-and-answer segment of the presentation what the county’s future plans were to address the issues at the jail– an answer Harkness didn’t seem to have.
“I know the sheriff is wanting a new jail and I know that we need a new jail,” Harkness said. “The problem is the taxpayers are trying to figure this out, and when people like me and Commissioner Palmer were elected, we were elected by a loud voice of voters saying ‘no more taxes on the backs of the homeowners.'”
Harkness says they’re “looking into it,” on how to fund a new jail, and he says he believes it’s at the “top of the list,” but the jail is not on the list of projects the county is currently working on.
The county officials involved said that they chose to not add the county’s jail to the list of SPLOST projects so that it wouldn’t consume the majority of the budget.
Public safety and county employees
That discussion of the jail brought up another concern: county employees and public safety.
Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell challenged Harkness’s comments about not raising property taxes, asking him what he would do if the only way to support comparable pay for county employees and public safety was to raise the millage rate.
Harkness skirted around the question, saying that the county currently has enough funds to support better pay for the rest of his term due to SPLOST funds. Terrell asked him how the county would address those funds in the future, to which he handed the microphone off to Commissioner Dustin Mealor, saying “he’s up for reelection.”
Mealor agreed that the county is in good financial shape, but that Terrell’s concerns were valid and that the county needed to address giving the employees what they need.
“I’ve been in the county manager’s ear a lot since she’s come [here], but I really do feel, because I get a lot of outreach from our employees with the county, that there is a lot of pay inequity amongst similar departments,” Mealor said. He also says the county’s pay isn’t on par with neighboring counties.
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He says that Habersham’s public safety and other departments can be like a “training ground,” where after a few years, employees will move to a new county where they can make more money. He says workplace loyalty isn’t like it used to be in his parents’ generation, where people would work the same place for the majority of their lives.
“Maybe some of its frustration with pay inequities, and younger people are just willing to say ‘I’ll just go somewhere else if you don’t value me,'” Mealor said. “But maybe it’s the employers not valuing their employees anymore.”
He says Habersham has to start valuing their employees more so that they don’t want to leave, bringing in needed equipment, improving pay and benefits so that people stay employed in Habersham County.
Habersham’s tax base
78 percent of the county’s budget is allocated for paying employee salaries and benefits, according to Vaughn. Currently, the county’s biggest revenue source is from property taxes.
Harkness says that he hopes that within the next few years, the county’s industrial tax base will grow and they won’t have to rely as heavily on the residential tax base to fund needed projects, like the new jail.
“We want to keep that millage rate low for you guys, as low as we can possibly keep it,” Vaughn said. “But we also have the challenge of providing services and making sure we’re listening to you [for] what that service level needs to be.”
Watch: State of the County
