Budget Meeting’s Abrupt End Focus of Discussion Tuesday

Paulding commissioners at their business session Tuesday agreed that they needed to await the return of one of their own before approving the minutes of .

Absent at Tuesday’s meetings of the Paulding County Board of Commissioners was Chairman David Austin. In his absence, the remaining four commissioners voted to table approval of the minutes of the board’s Aug. 2 work session—.

, at which Dallas-Hiram Patch was the only media outlet in attendance, saw Austin calling the meeting over once a motion to amend the proposed budget was approved. That action, and Austin’s subsequent exit from the boardroom in which the meeting was held, drew some displeasure from his fellow commissioners.

“Ultimately, during that meeting, I made a motion to change things, and when I made that motion, I asked specifically the question [of] ‘Are we going to keep working today,’ and I was told yes. Well, we didn’t, so that’s the issue of the minutes,” said Commissioner Tommie Graham, who presided over Tuesday’s two board meetings. He added that officially, the Aug. 2 meeting was adjourned due to a lack of a quorum.

“That meeting ended unusually. There are still some questions that need to be discussed when the chairman is here when everybody’s present,” Graham added.

“We just felt like there were a couple of things left out of those minutes, and we felt like to be fair, the chairman needed to be here in order to do that fair with everybody,” said Commissioner Todd Pownall, who proposed holding off on approving the meeting’s minutes.

The Aug. 2 work session saw commissioners approve a recommendation to increase the to the maximum rollback rate of 8.364 mills. Such an increase would be revenue neutral, as it would collect the same amount of tax revenues as this year, offsetting the drop in the tax digest.

Commissioners have yet to approve the final FY2013 budget, but are slated to take it up later this month.

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The proposed millage increase and the work session at which it was approved was the focus of Paulding resident Judy Horne’s comments when she spoke to commissioners during Tuesday morning’s work session. Horne had been one of three members of the public to attend the meeting on the budget.

Horne compared officials’ desire to keep tax collections as is to the taking of the same size slice of pizza even when county residents’ budgets—the pizzas—are getting smaller.

“The pie that we’re talking about a few years ago was like a large pizza pie; you have your slice. A lot of people in this county, their pie has gone from a large pizza to a medium or maybe even a pan pizza, yet you are still taking the same size slice,” Horne said. “Even though it’s revenue neutral, our portion of it is a larger portion, and I’d like you to keep that in mind.”

“Even with the rollback that is proposed, which is $22,354,000, that is still $4.5 million less in property tax than was in the 2009 fiscal year. There still is a reduction in the slice of the pie,” Graham responded following Horne’s comments.

Horne also addressed specifics of the proposed budget in her comments.

“[One] thing that was talked about was a 2-percent across-the-board raise for all county employees, with a 4-percent raise going to the sheriff’s office. … I don’t quite understand, the logic just escapes me, how we can give a 2-percent raise to employees when we’re currently furloughing these county employees,” she said. She also questioned a proposed “buyback” program in which employees who have accumulated enough personal days or sick days can trade some of those hours for pay.

“If we don’t need these people, why are we paying them not to work?”

And Horne went on to criticize the budget meeting’s ending, which was adjourned without a motion.

“We had two commissioners there still willing and trying to speak when the chairman left the room,” she said. “I just found it all awful—it was awful and unprofessional, and the citizens, in my opinion, deserve better.”

“I agree,” Pownall replied.

Pownall later Tuesday would motion to table approval of the Aug. 2 meeting’s minutes—an effort that was ultimately passed by his peers.

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