Whitfield County budget in the black?

Published 6:50 am Friday, May 11, 2012

The Whitfield County government may have ended 2011 with a budget surplus.

“We still have some tax numbers to straighten out. We’ve still got some numbers on insurance costs. But right now, from the 2011 audit, it looks like the county budget is going to be in the black,” said Board of Commissioners Chairman Mike Babb. “That ($42.2 million) budget started out with a $4 million deficit, but we worked on it, pared it down. And it looks like we may come in with a $400,000 surplus.”

Babb and other local leaders spoke Thursday morning at a Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce breakfast at the trade center.

Babb credited department heads and constitutional officers for holding the line on their budgets and finding ways to save money. But he also said the county could not have eliminated that deficit without a one-time change in its pension funding.

“We received a call from the (Association County Commissioners of Georgia), which handles our pension plan for county employees. They knew how the economy was across the state. They knew that our pension plan is basically fully funded, so if we wanted to take a one-time exemption on making the $1.6 million premium payment we could do that,” Babb said.

But Babb warned that the county still faces a budget deficit this year and may have to raise property taxes to cover it.

“The commission faces some difficult decisions this year,” he said.

Dalton Mayor David Pennington noted that when he first spoke at a chamber breakfast four years ago he said he and City Council members wanted to make Dalton a more attractive place to do business.

In 2008, Pennington said, Dalton had the second highest total property tax rate among peer cities such as Rome, Valdosta, Gainesville and LaGrange. The City Council has slashed the city’s property tax rate to 2.78 mills from 3.66 mills.. The city’s overall tax rate, which includes county tax and school tax, dropped to about 12.05 mills from 14.1 mills, making it now the second lowest among the peer cities.

“And our sales tax is now the cheapest, not just among those cities but in the South,” Pennington said.

With the expiration of the education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (ESPLOST) at the end of 2011, Whitfield County’s sales tax rate dropped to 5 percent.

Varnell Mayor Dan Peeples said the renovation and expansion of the historic Varnell House should be completed in a few weeks. The building will become a senior center when the renovation is finished. The work is being done by crews from the Georgia Department of Corrections, and Peeples said when they wrap up they will immediately begin work on a new City Hall next to the Varnell House. City offices have been in a modular building for the past four years since the City Council closed the old City Hall for safety reasons, citing concerns about mold and air quality.

Tunnel Hill Mayor Kenny Gowin said visits at the Tunnel Hill Heritage Center and the nearby Western & Atlantic railroad tunnel are up dramatically, and he thanked the Dalton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau for helping bring more visitors to those sites with increased advertising including billboards on I-75.

CVB officials say the tunnel and heritage center had some 1,800 visitors in the first four months of 2012. By comparison, they had 3,724 visitors in 2011 and 2,953 visitors in 2010.