Sales tax
Commission ends its work with tweaks to ballot text
Wachesaw Recreation Park project. That didn’t sound too exciting, even if it came with a $988,000 price tag.
Harris Chewning suggested adding a few words of description.
Gary Cooper agreed. “That’s going to be amazing; a dog park, a lot of stuff for citizens,” he said.
And it’s in an area that’s home to 18 percent of Georgetown County’s voters.
Chewning, Cooper and the other four members of the Capital Project Sales Tax Commission wrapped up their work last week, six months to the day that the last appointee was named to solicit projects, review them and put them in the form of a referendum ballot for voters in the November election.
County Council gave the first of three readings last week to the ordinance that will put the 1-cent tax before voters. The council also moved ahead with a second penny tax that will be used to offset property taxes.
There is concern that voters may not be willing to raise the sales tax by two cents, said Mark Hawn, who chaired the commission.
“That’s what I’ve heard,” Cooper said.
Walt Ackerman, the county’s director of Administrative Services, met with local real estate brokers about the sales tax. “It was very well received,” he said, but they also raised the issue of two extra pennies.
The commission’s final meeting was used to refine the ballot language for the capital projects tax to make it as appealing as possible.
Hawn suggested replacing the word “project” on the list of 22 priorities with more active words.
But they were cautioned by Ackerman, who has worked with the commission, that similar efforts have failed because the referendum questions were too long. Voters didn’t bother to read it and just skipped over the question.
Nevertheless, Wachesaw Park changed from a project to “redesign, additions and improvements.”
The $10 million for a new emergency operations and 911 facility became “Emergency Management Division Operations and 911 center construction.”
“Facility” didn’t reflect the importance of the project, Chewning said.
Commission member Reed Tiller said more complete descriptions could be included in a sample ballot.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Chewning said. “We could probably get a group of people together to stand outside those polling centers and hand out fliers.”
There will also be information about the project on the county website, Ackerman said.
The county can’t campaign for either sales tax, but it can make information about them available.
The priority projects add up to $74.4 million, with just over $2 million of that included by Ackerman to reflect the cost of project management. That will be a requirement for the other entities that will receive funds from the capital projects tax. Each will have to sign a funding agreement, something that was not required when the county adopted a similar tax in 2014. That led to a dispute with the town of Andrews, which received $3 million for a fire and police building, but contracted for a $5.2 million municipal center.
When the county refused to fund the balance, the town filed suit. That is still pending.
In 2014, “there was not as much forethought and deliberateness as this commission has taken to get to this point. That’s why we heard so many negative comments,” Ackerman said.
That needs to be emphasized in the marketing, Chewning said. “So many people have a bad taste in their mouth, especially in Andrews.”
Holding meetings around the county, and taking input on both the projects and the scoring metric, helped build public trust, Hawn said.
“They’ve got to believe that the money is going to be spent where we said it’s going to be spent,” he said.
The tax is now expected to generate $104 million over eight years, which will also cover the 19 contingency projects on the ballot.
