Glynn County Board of Commissioners - Regular Meeting

If he'll lead us in our invitation, Commissioner Tosteson will lead us in our pledge. If you'd be so kind as to stand with us, please.

Father, thank you for allowing us to gather today to do the people's business. And we're always minded on the other side of every problem. There is an opportunity. Thank you, Lord, for this beautiful day. Amen.

Amen.

Thank you. And I would like to add that we have two commissioners under the weather today. They're joining us via Teams, but not able to be here in person. And we appreciate them not spitting germs. So we'll begin with They're both there, right? I know. OK. He told me that he would be. First on our list is to receive a presentation from Whitney Neal Stewart, a PhD director of the Coastal Georgia Historical Society regarding Glynn County properties. And this was an item that was brought forward by Commissioner Sweb. You have a few openings.

Just a few opening comments. Chairman, it's our pleasure to have Dr. Whitney Neal Stewart, who joined us in 2025. That's correct. And from the University of Texas, Dallas, an author and a teacher. And we're honored to have you today for your presentation.

Thank you, David. Hello, commissioners. Wonderful to see you. I've seen a few of you before. when I came to ask for a little bit of help with our big semi-quincentennial event that we had in March, which, by the way, was a whopping success. We had 2,800 participants over the week from 19 states, but the majority were from Brunswick, Sea Island, and St. Simons. We've been doing some exciting things for our America 250, and of course next year is Glynn County's 250, which we're really excited hopefully to work with y'all on something for that too. I'm here today though to just give an update on the work that Coastal Georgia Historical Society does on the buildings that y'all own, but that we manage and maintain on St. Simons Island. And I wanted to do this because I've been trying to create a more open line of communication between the society and the county, just to ensure that you know that we are excellent stewards of the buildings that you own. They are your assets, they are the assets of the people, and we want to make sure that you are informed about what's happening at them. So I'm just going to give an overview of both the maintenance and the preservation work that the Society has recently undertaken at these structures, and just as a reminder, This is the Keeper's Dwelling, which is where the St. Simon's Lighthouse Museum resides, as well as the Coast Guard Station at East Beach. This is where the World War II Homefront Museum is. We lease these structures from the county for $1 in exchange for maintaining the buildings and running them as publicly accessible museums. And if you haven't been recently, please let me know. I will take you on a VIP tour. These are excellent museums. And they do a lot for the community. And just so you know as well, the county recently estimated that the 2026 rental value of these buildings is $150,000 roughly. So really my goal with this presentation is to create this open line of communication so we can provide more updates on the historic structures that y'all own and that we manage. I want to ensure that both parties feel that they are well informed. and able to tackle significant as well as routine maintenance and preservation projects with alacrity and with best practices in mind. I am a historian, and so I care deeply about these structures, but I'm also community-minded. They are for our community, and we want to make sure that they are available for us today, but also for future generations. So I just wanted to also make sure that we kind of distinguish between the two types of services that we provide. There's both maintenance and preservation. And I put together, thank you Chaki PT, a little bit of an infographic for y'all distinguishing maintenance and preservation. So maintenance are the kind of routine tasks that we undertake. This is our HVAC system, security and fire alarm, landscaping, hurricane prep, routine expenses. We use our operating funds for this. This comes from museum admissions and store sales, memberships, event rentals, and educational programs. And then there is preservation. And this is a different pot of money that we use. We have a historic preservation fund, which currently stands at over $2.5 million. Our generous supporters helped us raise this money over a period of several years, so we can better care for all of the historic structures that we steward. Not only those that our county owned, but also those that we own, like our iconic St. Simons Lighthouse. The fund is restricted specifically to preservation use, and so expenditures have to be consistent with the Secretary of the Interior's standards for the treatment of historic properties. This defines preservation as sustaining a building's historic form, integrity, materials. In other words, this is about keeping a building standing as a historic structure. We're not making major changes to it to modernize it. We're trying to make sure that we preserve it as much as possible to, for instance, for the Keeper's dwelling, the 1872 standards, or for the Coast Guard Station, 1936. So we draw funds as needed, and I'm going to describe a few projects that we recently undertook that utilize this preservation fund, but we strive to keep a large corpus at the ready in case of extreme emergencies. So I've been in this position as executive director for just over a year. I'm not completely sure what the relationship has been like in terms of updates in the past. and when you last received a report. So I want to focus just on the last couple of years, but would be happy to speak to work that was undertaken over the longer term as much as I can. So for 2025 and our year to date 2026, our expenses from the society for routine maintenance and historic preservation of county-owned structures total approximately $320,000. And over the past two years, we have undertaken several significant maintenance and preservation projects on county-owned structures. I want to highlight some of those for you here. At the St. Simons Lighthouse Keeper's Dwelling, exterior painting, window restoration, shutter hinge manufacture and repair, and the painting of our very specific and beautiful turn metal roof, that's that red pop roof that you see. Also, last year, I'm not sure if y'all read in the Brunswick News, but we had lightning strike our lighthouse twice. June 2025 and July 2025. And what happened is the electricity ran through any current that it could, and it took out our HVAC system in the Keeper dwelling. It also, by the way, migrated to our A.W. Jones Heritage Center. And so we put in high and low surge suppression systems, as well as a new HVAC and dehumidifier. At the Coast Guard Station, we replaced our windows in the tower. We also had to repair our basement windows. By the way, most people don't know that we have a basement at the Coast Guard Station. We do. Our archaeology lab is there. Again, if you haven't been, would love to show you around. Also, roof and gutter repair. We have a new dehumidifier. We rebuilt and painted our aerial marker. We repaired our historic halyard. We did exterior woodwork and then just very recently hand sanded and painted the entire campus of the museum. Hopefully you have seen it recently. She is looking beautiful, pristine white right now. And we've been very happy to work closely with the county on the East Beach Park project. We're very grateful for our new parking lot and for you taking away the volleyball court. I'm not going to say that too loudly because there's some people who really want it back. But we're happy to have more parking spaces for our museum. And we did highlight the county's work in our newsletter as well as on our social media, including for our Memorial Day celebration. Looking forward to next year and beyond, we have a few significant projects that I want to bring up. At the Keeper Swelling, we are having some water intrusion. There are issues with moisture on the interior walls. There's bubbling paint and plaster, which points to issues with the envelope of the building, so the exterior of the building, specifically the mortar. In the 1970s, the county replaced the original mortar of the Keeper Swelling with something called Portland cement. And this is a much harder, firmer, less porous material. And it is causing some of the bricks to crack. The brick is a very historically important savanna gray brick. These were bricks hand-formed by enslaved people outside of Savannah in the 1850s. And we have some of the very few bricks actually remaining that are this very special Savannah Gray outside of the city of Savannah. So we want to make sure that those bricks are preserved, not only because it's important to the building, but because each brick actually has historical significance. So we've been consulting with experts and gathering recommendations and bids for more than a year. While we originally thought we were going to have to replace every single bit of mortar in the keeper's dwelling, I'm very happy to say that after further consultation and research with master masons and historic preservationists, they're actually recommending instead that we do a much longer term strategic repointing of the structure. So this means that we're going to determine specific places where water is coming into the building. We are going to take out that hard Portland cement and put in lime plaster, which is a much, or put in a kind of lime cement that's a much more porous and historically accurate material. The rest of the building we will then monitor to see if this, any additional strategic pointing needs to be done. But this is going to ensure not only that the structure is preserved, but that that brick, that important historic brick is not further damaged. and we're going to be applying to some grants as well as using preservation funds for this project. One other thing with the Keeper's Dwelling, over the next few years, we are going to be completely overhauling our exhibits in the Keeper's Dwelling. We're pretty much creating a new museum. This is a really exciting opportunity. We're going to be having stakeholder meetings. We're going to be doing tons of research on what the community is interested in. But we're going to be creating a more interactive and engaging museum for our community. And as a part of that process, we are going to inspect and resolve some of the interior wall issues, including replacing the interior 1970s work. which put some gypsum on the walls and replaced that with historically accurate lime plaster, as well as adding some vents to help with some of the circulation issues that we're having. So these are just two things to be looking forward to, and we're going to continue to update the county with this new open line of communication as these projects move forward. Because that's, for me, the most important thing is this open communication. I want you all to know that your buildings are well cared for, that we are responsible stewards of these structures that mean so much to our community. And we're truly honored to maintain and preserve them, and we hope that our partnership in promoting the history of our region will grow from here. Happy to take questions about these projects or anything else relating to maintenance preservation or the work of the society.

Thank you. Commissioners, questions?

You mentioned, yeah, $2.5 million donor funds on hand for preservation?

Specifically for preservation. Our historic preservation fund, which were funds that were majority raised over the last several years and come from individual and family donations.

Okay. So is there a benchmark, or is it just, you know...

So it's not a traditional endowment where we're only able to draw 5% every year. We created it in a way to be more flexible in case there was an extreme issue. For instance, if there was a major storm and we needed to basically completely sand and repaint the entire lighthouse. And that's a multi hundreds of thousands of dollars project, which would be more than that 5%. So we have flexibility with that, but we try to only do the work that is necessary while also recognizing that there's some things that we need to do ahead of time so we're not in the future looking back and saying, I wish we would have done that earlier. We try not to do deferred maintenance.

All right. Commissioners, anything else?

Just a couple of things to add. So I met with Dr. Stewart a couple of times, and we've actually had Sean from Public Works out there to take a look at facilities and just give us some ideas on really what it's going to take to maintain those facilities and actually bring them back to where they need to be in the future. We continue to work on that, but I just want to thank Dr. Stewart for helping us out. They contributed and were partners with us for the 4th of July, so we worked with them. And they had their building open plus the lawn to share on the 250th for our nation. And then we're also talking to Dr. Stewart about some of the things that they can provide and work with us on for maybe some artifacts over at the courthouse during the 250th for the county. So continue to work on that.

Can't wait.

Doug Stewart, thank you so much. This was informative. And I did not know we had a basement. So I am curious. Great.

Come on over. It's full of really cool artifacts, some of which are thousands of years old.

Great. And I have toured it before, but I didn't get the basement tour.

All right.

Anyway, thank you so much. We look forward to you working with us on our Blaine County's 250th anniversary. We hope that's going to be a monumental event for us as well, and we look forward to that celebration.

And we get to continue using the term semi-quincentennial, which is great.

It has not flowed across this list yet. I get tongue-tied. All right. But thank you so much for being here today.

Thank you. Appreciate it all.

Thank you. Second on our list today is to discuss the proposed amendment to the Code of Ordinance, Glen County, Georgia, to amend Chapters 2 through 7 Fire Prevention Code to add a Section 2-7-13 to provide for cost recovery associated with hazardous materials incidents and for other purposes. And we have Chief Vinnie with us today and his team. Entourage and we're we're very happy to have you here today.

Thank you commissioners for the record Vinnie Christofalo fire chief Glen County Fire Rescue before I turn the podium over to chief Vigiano to discuss the ordinance want to take this opportunity to remind everyone that's watching and Here in the pay building that Glen County Fire Rescue will be holding its first citizens fire academy beginning October 1st 2026 hold on Thursday nights for eight weeks

um and the uh the idea of the academy is to give the public insight into fire department operations how we do things why we do things the way we do for our community i think that'll be a very successful program uh community for instituting that program we know that the police academy is gonna i mean our police department's gonna have another uh an academy there and uh that's very informative and then our assistant manager Mr. Danny has held citizen academies, and all this is to help our citizenry be more informed and involved, and I think it's showing great success. We look forward to that. Yes, sir. We look forward to it also.

Hope to see the commissioners there. For the record, where will that actually be held?

Most of the classes will be held at the EOC, and we will then venture out on certain nights to the training fields such as that. You know, there'll be opportunity for hands-on experiences for the participants.

What are the times of that on Thursdays?

It's 6 to 8 p.m. on Thursdays. Okay, and we're limiting it to 20 participants for the first go-round. So in order to sign up, on our Facebook page, on the county website, there's a QR code. You can scan the QR code and register through there. And our project manager, Inspector Dakel Walker, is the one putting this all together for us. I'd like to commend him and Chief Morrison for really doing the background work on this to get it up and running. So with that, I'd like to introduce Division Chief Stephen Vigiano to discuss the ordinance with you. Thank you.

Hello, everybody. So talking about the citizenry, I'm going to propose an ordinance that is focused on stewardship of the taxpayer dollar. So my name is Steven Maggiano, the Division Chief of Training for Glynn County Fire Rescue. I also coordinate the HAZMAT team. So although the HAZMAT calls tend to be infrequent, especially the larger magnitude ones, when they come in, Glynn County Fire Rescue still responds nonetheless. These events, when they grow larger, are very intensive on personnel requirements. They're often long in duration. They require specialized equipment that may be consumed by the incident or may be a single use item. So this ordinance just focuses on trying to make sure that the taxpayer in general is not sharing that burden that was brought on just by somebody who had a, by a responsible party. So fair and reasonable application of costs to the responsible party. We've already seen a couple of events where this would have made a big difference with large chemical fires in Glynn County. The partners that responded, Glynn County Fire Rescue, Jackson Mill, and Brunswick to Pinova, all received reimbursement. There was a similar incident, a chemical INDUSTRIAL FIRE WHERE WE HAVE NOT HEARD OF ANY MONEY BEING REIMBURSED. OBVIOUSLY, THAT EVENT PRECEDED THIS ORDINANCE THAT WE'RE PROPOSING, AND THIS ORDINANCE WOULD GIVE US A FRAMEWORK TO APPLY THAT BILLING. A FEW THINGS THAT IT WILL NOT DO. A FEW THINGS THAT IT'S NOT GOING TO DO. It's not going to make Glen County Fire Rescue or the county a long-term environmental mediator. That still lies with state and federal partners. It will not affect our emergency response. If the call comes out, our focus is the same as always, saving lives, stabilizing incidents, and protecting property as well as the environment. The responsible party will These are all going to be tangible items. They're not going to be arbitrarily billed. There will be lines that they can look at.

The RP will be able to request that bill. They can make an appeal.

But typically, following the ordinance is going to be a 60-day requirement to pay. This ordinance is in line with federal law, so the Emergency Planning Community Rights to Know Act, the EPCRA, as well as the SARA Act, the Superfund Amendment Reauthorization Act. Those are federal avenues for municipalities like us to receive reimbursement, but that reimbursement at the federal level is predicated upon us having done due diligence to try to recoup costs on our own. The best practice in the hazardous materials world seems to be applying a municipality-level ordinance like I'm proposing here. So that's the long and short of the ordinance. Does anybody have any questions?

It requires certification if it's not on the ordinance.

I would have to defer to legal, but no, I do not believe it requires any certification.

I have a question. Who is this saying that? Industrial?

This would be industrial partners, yes. So if someone is shipping a product or if there is a spill, a leak, a release of a chemical product, the industrial, the industry would be the responsible party typically. Now there can be confusing ones. Like if a gasoline tanker is hit by a distracted driver. so the ordinance also allows the fire chief to elect not to establish a responsible party that would still have to ultimately be approved by the county manager if we do if we elect not to apply billing so it's not any businesses or homeowners it's only industrial We're not looking at going after anybody. We're just looking at recouping costs. So the private citizen has an event. The bell rings. We go handle that. That's through our fire fund. That's what we are planning on. We have an operational budget that's built around that.

That's going to be part of my question. We already have a fire fund. And everybody, every house in certain areas pay it. And I would imagine businesses are paying into that too. Am I correct? So are we adding something on top of what we're already charged?

Because that's what it sounds like. If we have an event that requires a significant usage of equipment, so say... And say again, this is hazmat. Yes, for hazardous materials, not for general regular fire response. We're talking primarily exclusively chemical releases, leaks... anything like that that requires specialized equipment the fire department as a whole might not have but a specialized response team has to use so that the taxpayer body is not taking on the burden of resupplying equipment that we carry and these are extraordinary costs and this is just setting up a vehicle that allows the county to recoup those costs otherwise arguably we wouldn't have the authority to collect all that so this gives us the empowerment to do that

The obvious case is for some of the bigger hazmat situations we've had over the last few years. And I can, too, come to mind. So it's not. an everyday occurrence.

But keep in mind too, the I-95 corridor is a big example. So we have a lot, we're going to have a commodity flow study done soon for EMA, for the LAPC. There's people who are not conducting any business within our county. If they get involved in a roadway incident and they leak a product right next to a neighborhood, we don't want to be a free cleanup company. So if we have to use multiple suits at $1,500 per unit, there will only be single exposure suits so that company the shipping company and their cleanup contractor insurance they would ultimately help recoup those costs or be the ones that help us recoup those costs not the glen county taxpayer and as you stated earlier and as i had understood the reading of it that it is an itemized deal it's it's not just some arbitrary uh

amount that could be deemed a fine it is just cost recovery and it's itemized to the person that we bill it to absolutely yes anything else chief that's all from fire uh anything else to add to that

No, sir, just I appreciate Chief Vigiano and Aaron's team at Legal of going through and ensuring this recommended ordinance addition is in line with all the federal regulations and all. And I think as Chief Vigiano was explaining, this is a tool for us to recover costs for these hazmat incidents that shouldn't be burdened on the taxpayer.

Mr. Fallon, anything? No, I think that Stephen bringing up 95 is a good example of that, too. We haven't seen anything, but that could happen any day, certainly.

Danny, anything? No. All right. All right, well, great. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for the job you do for the citizens of Glebe County each and every day, all of our first responders. We appreciate that. We appreciate having you here. Lastly, on our agenda today is to talk about our military. We will be conducting a public hearing as the first of three that we will conduct. We have with us Ms. Munson, who will give us a brief oversight to begin with, and then we'll open the public hearing for any comment.

Good afternoon, commissioners. This is a public hearing on the adoption of the 2026 millage rates. There will be three public hearings as required by state law. Today is the first one. The next one will be August 20th at 6 p.m. at the county courthouse, and this will be on our regular BOC agenda under public rules. And then the final one will be held on August 27th right here in this room at 2 p.m. And this is the date that we will request adoption of the millage rate for 2027. It says 2026, which is always a little confusing, but the tax year is the year that we are going to bill the taxes, which is in 2026. But this is for our fiscal 2027 budget that's been adopted and we're already working in fiscal 2027. So this is a graphic of our annual budget and millage rate cycle. We basically work on this all year long. We start in January through May gathering requests from departments. We work with the tax assessor's office to evaluate the potential property tax revenue estimate. And then in June, we adopt our new budget. So in order to adopt the budget, we have to calculate a... what the amount of property tax revenue that we estimate is going to come in. Unfortunately, that number is not finalized from the property assessor's office until late July. And late July is when we receive those final numbers on our actual digest values. By then, we've already adopted the budget. So in August, we do what we're doing now, hold the public hearings, adopt the budget, and then the tax assessor continues to evaluate properties year-round. So why does this matter? It matters because we have to adopt the budget in June before we get the final digest numbers in July. So our property tax revenue is always an estimate in the budget. So what we're proposing is to hold the general fund millage rate at 3.864 mils, which is the same rate as the last three years. That we have reduced the rate, the millage rate, by 20.5% since 2021. Our calculated rollback rate is 3.623. So what this is, is this is a... calculation that we figure out what the millage rate would have to be if we collected the same amount of revenue in property taxes that we did last year. So if we wanted to collect the exact same amount of revenue that we did last year, our rate would be 3.623. And so because we have already adopted our budget, if we were, once I calculated this rollback rate, The budget shortfall for the general fund is currently $237,238 right now because the property tax digest when I received the final from the property assessor's office was lower than the estimates that I had received in April when I did the budget adjustments. So we're starting off the year $238,000 short in the general fund with our estimated revenue versus expenses. Of course, we all know that things change. There's vacancies. Different things come in. So I don't have a lot of heartburn about that. I think we'll be fine throughout the year. But we are starting off with less revenue. Had we adopted the rollback rate of 3.623, we would have been... $2.1 million short of our general fund budget. So the rollback rate, the difference between the 3.864 and the 3.623 is right at $1.9 million. So that's the primary reason why we are not adopting the rollback rate. So when you don't adopt the rollback rate, you have to advertise a property tax increase, even though the millage rate is not changing. It's not going up. It's staying the same as it has been the last three years. We have to advertise this increase because we are going to be collecting more money on the same millage rate that we had because our digest values have increased. So this is a slide, I'm not going to go over this, but this just is a slide for citizens that want to figure out how to calculate how a millage rate works, and it gives the basics for how you calculate a millage rate, what your home is worth, and how you figure out what your property tax should be. So in this example, a home at a $300,000 fair market value would pay $91.74 a month in property taxes. And that covers sheriff, police, fire, EMS, detention center, 911s, road, drainage, traffic. Parks, recreation programs, libraries, beach, animal control, all the courts and the election cycle, plus all the capital behind that. So that's just an example there of what someone would pay. And that is the total millage rate, not just the general fund. We're primarily focusing on the general fund, but that $91.74 a month is the total county millage rate.

Okay.

No, that does not include garbage. Garbage is an additional fee of $125 that is put on the property tax bill as a fee. It is not part of the property taxes. Yes, $125 over 12 months. This is our proposed 2026 millage rates by tax district. Um, the determining who pays for what millage is based on the services they receive. So for example, um, in district one, which is the city limits, they have their own police force. And so we don't charge city residents to cover our police services in the county. This chart does not include city of Brunswick taxes that city residents pay, and it also does not include school board taxes that are assessed countywide. This is just for Glynn County only. This is a snapshot of our FY27 budget. So what I call the full budget or the whole budget is $262 million. But the consolidated budget, which is the number that it ends up being one solid, the inter-fund duplications are removed. So that's the actual true number of what we're spending is the $199 million.

Our general fund budget is right at $83 million, and our capital plan is at almost $27 million.

This is a breakdown of where our money comes from and where it goes. You can see right there with the taxes, our total taxes are 136 million that we bring in. However, only 31% of that total is property taxes. The rest of it comes from sales taxes, business taxes, accommodation excise taxes. So 31% of property tax with the county, 31% of the taxes that are assessed are from property tax revenue. The rest of it is from other types of revenue. And then also our expenditures by function, you can see that we spend the vast majority of our budget is the number one expenditure is on public safety. This is, again, talking about the rollback rate versus the proposed rate. So the difference in the mills is 0.241, and down there at the bottom right is where I talked about the shortfall we would have been in the general fund if we had adopted the rollback rate, which was 2.19 million short, which is why we did not propose to adopt the rollback rate this year. What this means for the citizen's tax bill, if you have the Scarlett Williams homestead exemption, you won't see any change to your tax bill. The millage rate is staying the same, and you will not be affected for your property with homestead exemption. If you had a $300,000 property without a homestead exemption, you would see an increase of $28.92 for the year, which comes out to $2.41 per month. I noticed right before the hearing that I had in the title that we reduced the millage rate for three years, but we actually reduced it for four years in a row. So starting in 2021 through 2024, we brought our millage rate down a whole mill from 4.863 down to 3.864. And then the last three years, including this year, we are maintaining that same millage rate. So we've had a total reduction of right at 20% in the millage rate. So why can't our rate keep Why can't we keep adopting the rollback rate? So this is two slides that just compare our annual growth in the digest to our operating costs. I use public safety operating costs because they are the, you know, a big portion of our budget. But you can see our operating costs continue to grow each year. And just like any homeowner or business out there, we all know things are getting more and more expensive every day. So our costs are continuing to rise. But in 22 and 23, you can see where we were experiencing 12% growth, 13% growth in the digest. That growth has started to normalize now. You can see in 24 and 25 and 26, that growth rate has decreased. So these two lines are beginning to converge. Where used to our growth rate was high enough to keep up with our inflation, our growth rate now is not high enough to keep up with our inflation. So we're steadily cutting costs. We're very vigilant during our budget process to make sure that Um, we're only providing for the needs and not the wants of the departments to make sure that we're taking care of what our county is tasked to do. Um, this is a little bit about our county's fund balance and how it's structured. Um, so sometimes you'll hear on Facebook, the county has millions sitting there. Why are they still taxing us? So, you know, this is just a little bit of background on that. We do have a $30 million revenue stabilization fund. So this is for hurricanes. To give you a little bit of an idea of how quickly this can go, we had Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Irma several years ago, about 10 and 9 or 10 and 8 years ago. And we used that entire $30 million revenue stabilization fund during those two years. We do apply to receive money back from the federal government to help us with cover our costs when it comes to hurricanes. But it takes many, many years. In fact, we just closed out Irma this year and we just closed out Matthew last year. So we've been working on getting these reimbursements for over 10 years, you know, nine to 10 years for these storms, which is why we have to keep that revenue stabilization fund in place. And we try to keep it fully funded as much as possible. But it can definitely go fast. And Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Irma were not huge storms that hit us directly. If we did have a direct hit, it would have used that entire reserve plus more in one storm. So we really don't touch that unless it's an actual emergency. In our general fund, as far as unrestricted fund balance, which means this is money that we can use And it's not restricted for any reasons. We have right about $2 million in there. Now, this year, as I said, we are using some of our fund balances in several of our funds because our costs are increasing more than our revenues are increasing. So we're using fund balance in several of our funds. In the general fund, we're using almost $2 million of fund balance. So this $2 million that's left is after that $2 million usage that we've budgeted for. Public safety funds, we're using $4.5 million. I'm sorry, there's $4.5 million in operating reserves. In EMS, we have $4 million. In police, we have $1 million. Then all of our other funds pretty much are special revenue funds, which are restricted by law. So any of our court-related funds, grants, drug treatment funds, opioid seizure funds, those are all restricted by law. They cannot be used for general operations. We do use those whenever we're able to to cover certain costs, but those are not able to reduce the millage rate in the general fund. They cannot be used in the general fund. So I kind of went over this already, why spending reserves is not the answer. Storms are expensive, reimbursement is slow. If we had to borrow, it would cost more for us to borrow than it would for us to have our reserves. We can also earn interest on those reserves that we're keeping in the bank. And we do invest that money and earn interest on that money. So reoccurring costs, we need reoccurring revenue to be able to fund those. So the bottom line is we're asking to maintain the current 3.864 general fund millage rate after several years of reductions. Even at 3.864, we're still projected to be $238,000 below our budget in revenue. Adopting the 3.623 rate would increase our shortfall to 2.19 million, and we want to continue to maintain our emergency and operating reserves at appropriate levels. So again, these are our future public hearing dates. We do accept written comments at the email address there. for the Board of Commissioners, and they are made part of the public record. They are not read during the meeting, but they are made part of the public record. So any questions from the commissioners?

I have a question. Where out of the 159 counties do we rank with our millage rate?

So I have not calculated it this year, but when I calculated it last year, our general fund millage rate was the third lowest in the state. Out of 159 counties, we're the third lowest. The other two that were below us were really, really tiny counties.

Tamara, can you go back over just a quick summary of what the difference is in the revenue of the rollback rate versus the rate that we want to sustain?

All right. So with our proposed rate, All right, so our proposed rate at 3.864 and the rollback rate at 3.623, the difference between those two is approximately $1.95 million, so right at $2 million, would be the difference in revenue that we collect at the rollback rate versus the proposed rate.

Okay, so that's round numbers is $2 million spread over all property owners in the county.

Yes. And, again, this would not affect homesteaded properties. So, you know, it would not be a significant amount of money at all for, as I said before, with this housing example.

Let's see.

The difference for a property that's valued at $300,000 in whether we adopt the rollback rate or not is $2.41 a month or $28.92 for the whole year. Thank you.

Commissioners, any other questions before we open the public hearing?

Tamara, you said this, but could you repeat the total property taxes is what percentage of the budget?

So I don't have that number calculated, but I can tell you that the total property tax is... Yes, 31% of total county revenue is what is made up of property tax. The rest is brought in through other types of taxes, primarily sales tax and accommodation excise tax. And then, you know, all of our grants factor in there and all of that.

All right. Thank you, Ms. Bonson. Anything else before we open the poll here? Mr. Clark, I understand you were able to make it through online. Do you have any questions? No, sir. You need to save your voice, I think. Thank you for being online with us. All right. This is a public hearing, and it will be limited to one hour. uh but each individual speaker will have five minutes uh and we are here to talk about the budget only so military the military i'm sorry and uh and have your comments be relevant to that please so with that we'll open the public hearing and uh we're looking at mostly home folks except for you guys do y'all have a comment for tonight

if you would when you speak into the mic if you'd state your name for the record please and thank you for coming today all the way um my name is paulette chavers ransom i'm a new resident here in glenn county thank you for not increasing the millage rate i'm grateful for that and i do understand why you didn't roll back or accept that um adopt the rollback I do understand that. My question for the council or commissioners is, I just want to know, did you guys adopt the FLOSS? That's the floating local option sales tax. Was that adopted?

No, ma'am. Okay. We're making this too easy. Any other comment for today? Can you tell me how many people we have streaming online? Is that?

I know that Commissioner Booker did get online.

OK. Commissioner Booker, welcome. Do you have any comments? He's feeling under the weather like Commissioner Clark is. All right. This is a public hearing. This is the first opportunity to speak. There will be two others as we move toward the 27th. And seeing no other comment, we'll close the public hearing. And, commissioners, we're back to you. Chairman, do we have an executive session? Chairman, I will move that we adjourn from the regular meeting and go into the executive session. Property acquisition and pending litigation.

And personnel.

All right. We have a motion by Commissioner Dunn and a second by Commissioner Rafalski to go into executive session for the purposes of property acquisition, potential litigation, and personnel. Any discussion? All in favor, please raise your right hand. That is unanimous. We stand in recess.

Thank you again for coming.

Need a motion to come out of executive session. Move to return from executive session. Second. Have a motion from Commissioner Duncan, a second from Commissioner Swick to come out of executive session. All in favor, please raise your right hand. That is unanimous. Mr. Clark, I think you were tuned into executive session as well. Correct.

Correct.

OK. Boy, we need your picture up there so you can raise your hand and not have to speak. All right, matters to come before the board.

Mr. Chairman, I move to approve the recommendations of the Director of Capital Development and Procurement regarding property acquisition.

Second. I have a motion by Commissioner Rafalski, a second by Commissioner Duncan to approve the matters of property acquisition as recommended by the attorney. Any discussion? All in favor, please raise your right hand. And Commissioner Clark. Can't see the hand and looking for a squeaky eye. All right. Bo, you're on mute if you're trying to talk. All right. The hand went up. There we go. So it is unanimous. Thank you. All right. Any other business? Come before the board.

Mr. Chairman, a motion to adjourn.

Second. I have a motion by Commissioner Rafalski, a second by Commissioner Duncan to adjourn. All in favor, please raise your right hand. And that is unanimous. We stand adjourned. Thank you.