After its called special session on July 28, the Bulloch County Board of Education announced its intention to increase the 2022 property taxes it will levy this year by 5.54 percent over the rollback millage rate. The public hearings on this tax increase are scheduled to be held on August 8 and August 15.
Each year, the Bulloch County Board of Assessors is required to review the assessed value for property tax purposes of taxable property in the county. When the trend of prices on properties that have recently sold in the county indicate there has been an increase in the fair market value of any specific property, the board of assessors is required by law to re-determine the value of such property and adjust the assessment. This is called a reassessment.
When the total digest of taxable property is prepared, Georgia law requires a rollback millage rate to be computed that will produce the same total revenue on the current year’s digest that last year’s millage rate would have produced had no reassessments occurred.
In accordance with Georgia Code 20-2-165, boards of education must maintain an equivalent millage rate of at least 14 mills to prevent a loss of their state equalization grant funding. Currently, Bulloch County Schools’ state equalization grant funding totals more than $5 million.
Due to the reassessment of property values in Bulloch County, the rollback millage rate required by Georgia law would cause Bulloch County Schools’ equivalent millage rate to fall below 14 mills, thus causing loss of the school district’s equalization funding. Therefore, the Bulloch County Board of Education intends to adopt an equivalent millage that is at least 14 mills to secure the school district’s equalization funding.
The 14-mill calculation requirement is composed of the property tax millage rate that the board must adopt annually along with the equivalent mills produced by the Local Option Sales Tax that the school district collects for maintenance and operations purposes.
Based upon the value of the 2022 tax digest, per the Bulloch County Board of Assessors’ reassessment, a complete rollback of the district’s millage rate would be 7.829 mills, which when combined with the imputed value of Local Option Sales Tax collections of 5.737 mills, equates to only 13.566 mills, which is below the legal threshold.
In order to maintain the minimum 14 mills of property tax required under Georgia Code 20-2-165, Superintendent of Schools Charles Wilson proposed during the special session that the Bulloch County Board of Education adopt a property tax millage rate of 8.263 mills, bringing the total effective millage rate to 14.000 mills. Due to the nature of the millage rate rollback process, this action will effectively constitute an increase in property taxes.
All concerned citizens are invited to the public hearings on this tax increase to be held at the Bulloch County Board of Education at 150 Williams Road, Statesboro, Georgia on Monday, August 8, 2022 at 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., and on Monday, August 15, 2022 at 12 noon.
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Bulloch County Schools
