Franklin County BOE Passes FY2017 Budget
Franklin County’s Board of Education has passed their Fiscal 2017 budget with not as much to spare as in previous years.
The School Board’s fiscal year begins July 1.
The estimated revenue projection for fiscal 2017 is just over $32.5 million with expected expenditures at just over $33.5 million.
School System Finance Director Tom Porter told the Board at their meeting Thursday he recently went over the tax digest with Franklin County Tax Commissioner Bobby Martin.
Martin told him the tax digest is improving slowly, but not enough to show any real financial gains for the school system.
“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, the County overall has not expanded economically to any great degree over the past five years.
Just before passing their budget, Porter gave them a brief synopsis of the 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.”
Porter also reminded the Board they have opted to cut the millage in FY17 by a half-percent to 18.118 mills, which he said will leave the school system with just $862,229 in their reserve fund.
Porter said earlier it is recommended the school system have at least a million in the reserve fund.
After hearing from Porter, the Board voted unanimously to pass the FY17 budget.
A public hearing to set the millage is set for Thursday, June 30th .
The Board will formally vote to pass the new millage rate in July.