MOULTRIE, Ga. — The Moultrie City Council set an almost record low Millage Rate in its meeting Tuesday night.

The council voted unanimously to accept the previously tentative lowered millage rate of 8.12 in its regularly scheduled session. This is a decrease from the 2020 rate of 8.14.

“This is the city’s lowest millage rate in recent history,” Moultrie City Manager Pete Dillard stated during the regular session. “You’d have to check sometime before the year 2000 for a lower one.”

The millage rate decrease comes at a time that the council is looking at major projects moving forward. In a previous meeting, Dillard presented the council with the FY 2021-2022 budget. During that meeting, Dillard stated that the new budget will be slightly smaller than last year’s.

“Not much has changed,” Dillard stated in a previous article in The Observer regarding the budget. 

The 2021 budget is $189,034 less than the previous year’s. Along with the budget changes, the council recently promised $1.35 million paid over five years for an expansion at the South Georgia campus of the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, and the Environmental Protection Agency has given the city three years to completely shut down operations at the Spence Field wastewater treatment facility, according to Dillard. 

During Tuesday’s meeting, Councilman Daniel Dunn credited the city’s department heads and employees for the lowered tax rate.

“It’s all thanks to the hard work of our department heads and all the workers. They’ve been doing more with less and our city is better for it,” stated Dunn towards the end of the meeting.

Along with the acceptance of the millage rate, the council voted to adopt the Annual Balanced Budget for FY 2021-2022, which had been presented during the Sept. 7 meeting.

The board unanimously passed the consent agenda, which included the acceptance of a donation of property located at 301 Sixth St. N.E.

“We plan to tear it down and clean it up once we own it,” Dillard stated in the work session preceding the meeting.

Councilman Cole Posey was appointed to the Moultrie-Colquitt County Parks and Recreation Authority Board. His term of office is Sept. 1 to Dec. 31, according to the meeting’s agenda.

Also included in the consent agenda was a rezoning application for which a public hearing is to be held on Oct. 5 and the acceptance of a bid for southwest box culvert improvements to Griffin Grading and Concrete LLC of Cordele, Ga., in the amount of $1,097,766.68 from the TSPLOST fund.

During the City Manager’s report, Dillard recommended that the council move to donate a surplus 2007 Chevy Impala to the Southern Regional Criminal Justice Program.

“The car is not usable for the city anymore,” Dillard stated.

The vote to donate the vehicle was also accepted by the board.

The next regularly scheduled city council meeting will be 6 p.m. Oct. 5.