Members of the SPLOST Committee met on Thursday night at the Cohutta Community Center
The SPLOST Citizens Advisory Committee met for more than two and a half hours on Thursday night to review the list of projects requested by the governments of Whitfield County and its municipalities. During the meeting, the committee took its first actions, voting unanimously to recommend a four-year term for a potential SPLOST measure and a projected $80 million budget.
The committee is comprised by residents appointed by the Whitfield County Board of Commissioners and the City Councils of Dalton, Varnell, Tunnel Hill, and Cohutta. The committee has been assigned to review project requests and recommend which ones should be included on a potential ballot initiative next May to extend the 1% SPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax). The SPLOST was approved by voters in 2020 and will sunset next October. If voters approve the May ballot initiative, the tax would continue.
Committee chairman Chris Shiflett opened Thursday night’s meeting with a brief recap of the committee’s meetings so far as he noted that there was a larger audience for the meeting than had attended previous sessions. Mr. Shiflett told those in attendance that the committee had heard project proposals from each department of the county and City of Dalton governments as well as the smaller municipalities. He also clarified that the SPLOST can only pay for capital projects, not the normal maintenance and operations budgets.
“These SPLOST requests are capital projects that quite frankly without a SPLOST there is not money in the county budget anywhere remotely close to pay for these things,” Mr. Shiflett said Thursday night. “We went through all of these projects - things for the police departments, fire departments, public works, roads, recreation, all of those things - and there is simply no other way to pay for these things without a 1 percent sales tax that everybody pays, and a considerable number of people from outside of our community pay when they come here to work or they travel through Whitfield County.”
By state law, a potential SPLOST can be levied for up to five years if approved by a county’s voters. However, when debating the length of the term for a potential new SPLOST, the committee’s members agreed that they believed five years seemed to be too long. Instead, a motion was made to recommend a four-year term for the SPLOST measure and the committee voted unanimously to approve. The current SPLOST in effect in Whitfield County also runs for a four-year term and will sunset in October 2024.
The committee also needed to set the projected budget for the SPLOST measure before recommending the projects for inclusion. Chairman Shiflett noted that thus far, the existing SPLOST has collected approximately $23 million per year. Whitfield County has projected that a new SPLOST beginning in late 2024 could expect to collect $17.5 million annually, but committee members noted that this was a very conservative projection given the possibility of a recession. After a recommendation from Mr. Shiflett, the committee voted to set the budget for the SPLOST at $80 million, which would amount to an annual collection of $20 million per year.
Once those measures were completed, the committee then agreed that they would only make project recommendations for Whitfield County and the City of Dalton while allowing the governments of the smaller municipalities to set their own project proposals because they amounted to a much smaller portion of the overall SPLOST collection.
The committee then reviewed at length each of the projects that were requested by Dalton and Whitfield County. After that refresher on each project, the committee then requested that both the City and County provide a prioritized list of the projects listed in order of importance and necessity. The committee will meet again next week on Thursday, Nov. 9, at 6 p.m. at the Dalton-Whitfield Public Library to begin assembling the list of its final project recommendations.
For more information on the SPLOST, visit whitfieldcountyga.com/splost/splost.htm.