The DCTP is very concerned about the financial impact to county taxpayers if the BOC does not bring our law enforcement pay to a competitive level in 2015. We have learned that Cobb and Fulton counties will be hiring approximately 500 new officers in the next 2 years at starting wages that exceed the proposed wages the BOC is considering in the 2015 budget by a considerable amount. The cost to maintain our sworn deputies with competitive pay now is far less than the cost to recruit and train new inexperienced ones. Should we experience an unsustainable turnover rate, which we fully expect with the current BOC proposal, the additional costs of recruiting, training, increased crime, unsolved cases and longer response times will hit our wallets and our community hard. We find it completely unacceptable that the BOC increased country spending by $12M a year with the 24% millage rate increase and did not address our law enforcement pay which is one of the lowest in the area. Below is an article that was in the Sunday Sentinel regarding tomorrows public hearing. The DCTP will convey our concerns to the BOC at the hearing and were encouraging citizens to attend the hearing and to contact the BOC demanding that they address this pay issue NOW without increasing the 2015 budget vs.kicking the can down the road which will inevitably put our wallets and families at risk. Sentinel Article: Douglas County taxpayers are about to get their chance to speak openly to the Board of Commissioners about the proposed 2015 budget. The public hearing will take place during the regular Board of Commissioners meeting on Tuesday at 10 a.m. at the Douglas County Courthouse. This will be one of two opportunities citizens get to sound off on the proposed $75.2 million budget before it is adopted, which is scheduled to happen at the BOC’s Dec. 16 meeting. Taxpayers can also sign up to speak during the Dec. 16 meeting. Transparency with the budget continues to be an issue for citizens. The budget retreat, where most key decisions were made about the budget, was held at a luxury hotel in Peachtree City on Nov. 6-7 at a cost of over $2,500 to taxpayers. The county is meeting its legal requirement to advertise the public hearing in the newspaper. But the ad, which ran in the Sentinel recently, points citizens to the county website at celebratedouglascounty. Good luck finding the three-page summary of the proposed budget if you want to see what’s included. You’ll have to click Departments at the top, then Finance. Once you make it to the Finance page, look in the lower right corner for a link to 2015 Proposed Budget. The document you’ll eventually find is a three-page synopsis that gives little detail other than how much money will go into each general government category. To spare you some trouble, here is a direct link to the three-page report: celebratedouglascounty/view/global/viewdownload/&docid=4995&file=/Douglas_County_GA_2015_Proposed_Budget_2.pdf. Sheriff Phil Miller made headlines when he told the BOC at their Constitutional Officers Retreat in October that he’s losing veteran deputies to surrounding agencies over pay, which he said ranks 17th out of 18 agencies in the area. Commissioners have said raises for all county employees are included in the budget, but the specifics aren’t shown in the three-page summary online and weren’t made available to the Sentinel despite requests earlier in the week. The Douglas County Tea Party, which has been a strong supporter of transparency and frugal spending in county government, released a statement Saturday saying that capital projects like the animal shelter should be paid for using SPLOST dollars rather than revenue that comes from property taxes. The tea party said it is in agreement with the sheriff on the issue of pay raises for deputies. At the Constitutional Officers Retreat, Miller asked for a 10 percent raise across the board for public safety employees, a 2.5 percent merit increase and a 5 percent raise for civilian employees. “When looking at the increased funding most of these counties are allocating to their law enforcement, the proposed increase our BOC is considering in the 2015 budget will put Douglas County at a significant competitive disadvantage with attracting and keeping qualified sworn deputies to protect our county,” the group said. “While the public and elected officials will never fully agree on how every dollar is spent, Douglas County citizens are not willing to compromise our public safety to support additional capital projects.” Last year, the tea party asked for $10 million in cuts to the budget to give tax relief to citizens. Those demands came on the heels of a tax rate increase of 23.74 percent passed by the BOC in July of 2013. This year, the tea party said it is asking for three things: A budget that maintains current budget dollars without an increase; the elimination of capital expenditures in 2015, which they said could be moved to a potential new SPLOST in 2016 after the jail SPLOST is paid off; and a reallocation of funds to give the sheriff the raises “asked for to ensure our sworn law enforcement officer pay is competitive thus minimizing putting our public safety at risk via an unsustainable turnover rate.” While specific details about the budget aren’t online, District 4 Commissioner Ann Jones Guider said citizens should come to the public hearing to have their questions answered. One issue likely to be addressed Tuesday is the sharp decline in the proposed budget from a year ago. The 2015 budget is down $13.5 million from the $88.7 million budget adopted in 2014 in large part because the county has not reached an agreement with the city of Douglasville for fire and animal services. If an agreement is not reached before the end of the year, according to Guider, the county cannot provide fire and animal services to the city of Douglasville after the first of the year. “We do not have a service delivery agreement with the city of Douglasville,” Guider said. “By law, the county cannot provide fire and animal control to the city of Douglasville unless there is a signed agreement. ... As of January 1st, by law, we cannot provide the service unless we have the agreement. We need the agreement.” Douglasville Mayor Harvey Persons said he believes that the negotiations will come to a resolution before the end of the year. “I am very confident that we will get that done,” Persons said. “The city and county are negotiating right now. Everyone is working diligently to negotiate an outcome that is to the benefit of all taxpayers.” Persons refused to speculate on the outcomes if an agreement could not be made but he did say that fire service will continue and that it is just a matter of how it will be done.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 01:42:34 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015