Dear editor:

I must refute a statement written by Mr. Bruce Leigh in this week’s editorial section of the Observer. He again repeated and referenced an article from the Sunlight Project which falsely indicated that our county already has higher taxes than the counties around us. The author of this particular article compared county millage rates without comparing county Board of Education millage rates. Doing so is not an accurate comparison as the Colquitt County Board of Education is the beneficiary of two local sales tax pennies: LOST and E-SPLOST.  It should be noted that Colquitt County is one of only eight out of 159 Georgia counties where the county Board of Education receives both the LOST penny and the E-SPLOST penny.  As a result, our Board of Education millage is much lower than any of the comparison counties mentioned in the referenced Sunlight Project article.  To wit:  Tift County BOE millage is 17.946.  Baldwin County BOE millage is 17.06. Lowndes County BOE millage is 16.911.  Whitfield County BOE millage is 18.756. Colquitt County BOE millage is 10.281.  Failing to mention the corresponding BOE millage in these counties was a glaring omission as it would have showed that Colquitt County had the lowest combined millage rate of the comparison counties, not the highest. The article’s author, John Stephen, apologized for the error.

Additionally, I must also refute Mr. Leigh’s assertion that our Board of Commissioners and our City Councils hope its citizens would just “forget about the T-SPLOST before voting time.” On the contrary, our local governing bodies have been discussing T-SPLOST routinely for over two years, held numerous discussions in multiple open meetings at the county level, conducted three joint city-county-authority public meetings, presented overviews of T-SPLOST to multiple local civic organizations, pored over hours and hours of submitted staff work for proposed common sense T-SPLOST projects, posted document after document on websites and announcement boards, and finally voted to put T-SPLOST before the voters over the course of several meetings open to the public. The evidence suggests that our locally elected leaders would like our citizens to be informed about the impacts of T-SPLOST and encourage them to exercise their rights as an informed electorate, not the other way around.

Finally, the Board of Commissioners does share Mr. Leigh’s concerns with the growing amount of sales tax exemptions on state and local taxes. However, we would suggest that Mr. Leigh contact members of the Georgia General Assembly to plead his case.  All of the exemptions in his editorial are state exemptions, not county or city exemptions.

As to the impact of T-SPLOST on Colquitt County, Mr. Leigh does not address this in his editorial. The Board of Commissioners and each of our six municipalities did not agree to put T-SPLOST on the ballot with the purpose of sticking it to the pocketbooks of our citizens. The Board of Commissioners and all six of our municipal city councils – whom the citizens of this county have chosen to represent them – unanimously agreed to put T-SPLOST before the voters because they felt there was a justifiable and compelling need to do so.  This cannot be overlooked.  For more information concerning T-SPLOST, please refer to the Board of Commissioners website at www.ccboc.com under the T-SPLOST heading.  We agree with Mr. Leigh that our citizens should educate themselves about this particular issue and exercise their ability to determine the path forward for our hometown county.

Respectfully,

Chas Cannon

County Administrator