Franklin Co. BOE Passes FY 17 Budget

By MJ Kneiser, WLHR Radio, Lavonia

Franklin County’s Board of Education has passed its Fiscal Year 2017 budget with not as much to spare as in previous years.

The school board’s fiscal year begins July 1.

The Franklin County Board of Education has opted to cut its millage rate in Fiscal Year 2017 by a half percent to 18.118 mills.

According to Franklin County School System Finance Director Tom Porter, that will leave the Franklin County school system just $862,229 in its reserve fund.

Porter said the tax digest is improving, but slowly.

“What we’re seeing is that we’re slowly improving every year since the recession,” Porter explained. “What he’s seeing is not really what he considered real growth in the tax digest, but it’s inflationary growth in prices on existing property. There’s not a whole lot of new property being developed in the County.”

Porter said except for some real growth in Lavonia, Franklin County overall has not expanded economically to any great degree over the past five years.

Just before passing the budget, Porter gave the Franklin County Board of Education a brief synopsis of some of the other changes for the next fiscal year.

“In a nutshell, you added the 3% salary for everybody, that was a big change,” he said. “We added some new positions. We added back the full local supplement. But all this is really because they put a lot of extra money in the State Budget. They’re slowly doing away with the austerity cuts which was a big boost to us by $700,000.”

After hearing from Porter, the Franklin County Board of Education voted unanimously to pass its Fiscal Year 2017 budget.

Meanwhile, the Franklin County school board will formally vote to pass the new millage rate in July.