Franklin Co. BOE Looking to Lower Millage Rate

By MJ Kneiser, WLHR Radio, Lavonia

The Franklin County Board of Education is planning to lower its millage rate.

At a called meeting earlier this month, the Franklin County Board of Education got a preliminary look at its Fiscal Year 2017 budget.

The estimated revenue projection for Fiscal Year 2017 is just over $32.5 million with expected expenditures at just over $33.5 million.

Franklin County School System Finance Director Tom Porter told the School Board that the system will be getting some savings from the Governor’s plan to give back monies lost during the austerity cuts of the 2008 recession.

“The big news this year for FY17 is that Governor when he proposed his budget he said he was going to give back a lot of the austerity cuts,” Porter said. “For us that will be about $700,000 reduction in austerity cuts. In addition to that we also got some more money from the QBE earnings and also from the equalization. So the QBE earnings came out a little over $900,000 more from the previous year and that’s good to know.”

Porter said the school system will get about $957,000 more in revenue.

However, as the board poured over the list of priority requests from teachers, departments and staff, it began to discuss lowering the millage in order to provide the Franklin County school system with a pad.

The current millage rate for the Franklin County school system is about 18.48 mills.

The highest the System could set the millage at by state law is 20 mills.

Board member Robin Cato motioned the current millage be lowered by a half percent.

Cato said that would not only help taxpayers but would also give the School System some working room.

“I don’t want to drop it so low that next year we bring it back up,” Cato told the board. “But I would think our goal here to chip away at that millage. Another thing is, if we hit another rough patch, we’ve got to have some room to go back up. We hear stories of other school systems that are sitting at 20. Just think about it, there’s no other little bucket to dip into. We’d have nothing.”

Dropping the millage by a half percent will lower it to 18.11 mills and bring the projects reserve fund balance down to $862,229.

After hearing from Cato and more discussion, the Franklin County Board of Education voted unanimously to lower the millage rate by a half percent and approved the proposed Fiscal Year 2017 budget.

A called meeting will be held Tuesday to formally pass the Fiscal Year 2017 budget for the Franklin County school system.

Then in July, the Franklin County Board of Education will hold meetings to formally lower the millage rate.