- April 28, 2024
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Property taxes will increase for Flagler County residents next year, but the increase will be limited to less than $1 per $1,000 of taxable value.
The Flagler County Board of County Commissioners on Monday cut about $1 million from the county’s budget to hold down the tax increase. To save money, the commission will hire fewer employees next year and will decrease its cost-of-living salary increase for current employees. After making the cuts, the commission agreed on a proposed increase of 0.975 mills.
If that increase were approved, it would bring the county’s tax rate to $8.055 per $1,000 of taxable property value.
The years after the recession squeezed the county’s budget, and now, County Administrator Craig Coffey said previously, the county needs to create a stronger, more sustainable budget.
“There have been a lot of cans kicked down the road, and we can’t keep kicking them down the road,” Commissioner Nate McLaughlin said, referencing the capital projects that have been put off in the past five years. “There’s a junk pile in front of us,” he said.
In addition to the county’s needs, Coffey said, the tax increase was unavoidable largely because of state-mandated expenses that the county will begin to incur next year (for example, the county must now pay $455,000 more in Medicaid matching dollars).
Most of the proposed tax increase would fund those state increases. It would also help pay for capital projects the county put off to survive as property values plummeted, as well as a slight cost-of-living raise for county employees.
The $1 million in cuts came from shaving money from a multitude of sources. Coffey suggested that, rather than hiring seven new employees as previously planned, the county only hire three.
He also suggested decreasing the cost-of-living increase slightly. The originally proposed increase would give a 3% raise to employees, but instead, Coffey suggested giving a 2.5% or a 2.25% raise instead (an alternative would be giving a flat raise of $700 or $1,000 per employee, but that was criticized as being unfair to higher-earning employees).
Finally, Coffey said, the county can use “one-time money” for one-time expenses, such as a new ambulance the county is slated to purchase in the next year. For example, the county only plans to receive 95% of its property taxes in its budgeting, and any money above that usually rolls into the county’s reserves. But by using that money to pay for one-time expenses, the county could hold its tax rate down, Coffey said.
Commissioners were challenged to decide which projects could be cut without overstretching the budget.
For example, Commissioner Barbara Revels suggested waiting to implement a pretrial release program meant to moderate jail populations, but McLaughlin said that doing so would only increase the costs that would need to be swallowed in future years.
The commission did not decide whether to cut the pretrial release program, or whether the cost-of-living salary increase should be set at 2.25% or 2.5%, but it was able to reach a consensus on its proposed rate increase.
The commission will meet at 9 a.m. July 31 to set a tentative millage rate. Once that rate is set, the commission can lower it but cannot raise it.
Email Megan Hoye at [email protected].
