After unanimous votes by the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners and Statesboro City Council on Tuesday and approval by the Brooklet, Portal and Register councils last week, a “FLOST” referendum for a new 1% sales tax is slated for a Nov. 4 countywide ballot.
The “Floating,” or “Flexible” Local Option Sales Tax, if approved by a majority of voters, will add a ninth penny of sales tax in the county, with the revenue to be used for an eventual reduction in property tax. But that property tax relief won’t arrive immediately, as Statesboro City Manager Charles Penny emphasized during a Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 19, mayor and council work session.
“We do want the taxpayers to know that it’s not going to be an immediate thing,” Penny said. “It’s basically two years to implement from the time that they actually vote for it in November, to start collecting funds in January of 2026, but the reduction wouldn’t occur until July, or September, of 2027.”
A 2024 Georgia law, enacted as House Bill 581, created multiple options for local property tax relief. One of these is a special “floating” homestead exemption that, after freezing the value of owner-occupied homes as assessed for taxes at 2024 levels through this year, will be followed next year and beyond by a provision limiting assessment increases to the inflation rate of the national Consumer Price Index.
Another key House Bill 581 provision is the FLOST, available in counties where neither the county government nor any of the cities in that county opted out of the floating homestead exemption.
If approved by a majority of Bulloch voters in November, the additional 1% sales tax will take effect Jan. 1, 2026 and last for five years unless renewed. The FLOST rollback, unlike the homestead exemption, will apply to all types of taxable property.
Law mandates delay
But as Chairman David Bennett of the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners also explained in an interview last week, the revenue legally couldn’t be distributed to the cities or used by the county for a rollback until July 1, 2027. Until that time the money will be held in a special fund.
Interest can be earned on bank deposits of the money, and that would also be distributed among the cities and county, Penny told City Council. But even the interest, he said, will probably have to be accounted for as part of a rollback of the property tax millage.
“This is not (a revenue) enhancement; this is a replacement,” he said. “It’s designed to give the taxpayers relief on their property taxes, and it shifts the burden to sales tax.”
The delay until July 1, 2027 after the first year’s revenue accumulates is intended to give the local governments time to build the new revenue into their fiscal year 2027-28 budgets, which would begin on that date.
Penny told Statesboro’s mayor and council this would be reflected in the millage rate they would be setting after July 1, 2027. If this follows the current pattern, the resulting rate would not be set until September.
So property taxpayers wouldn’t actually see the resulting millage rate rollback for almost two years.
Not by population
Because it is meant to offset property taxes, the distribution of the FLOST revenue among the county and cities will be based on their previous year’s property tax collections as a share of the total property tax (not including school tax) collected by all of the local governments.
Based on their 2024 property taxes and sales taxes as an example, the FLOST could provide a 39% rollback of each local government’s millage rate. This was part of an “allocation illustration” included with the intergovernmental agreement after key officials from the cities and county met recently to agree on the draft.
According to the illustration, in 2024 the cities and county (not including the Board of Education) collected at total of $44.88 million in property tax. Of this, 81.17% went to the county, 17.66% to the city of Statesboro, and less than 1% each to the other three cities and towns: 0.89% to Brooklet, 0.21% to Portal and 0.07% to Register.
So those would have been their percentage shares of FLOST, if it had been collected based on 2024, when a 1% sales tax in the county netted about $19.2 million. So, based on the example year, the Bulloch County government would have received $15.59 million, Statesboro $3.39 million, Brooklet $171,376, Portal $39,876 and Register $12,896, each to replace 39.28% of their property tax.
Bennett favors passage of the FLOST referendum.
“I support it because I personally hate property taxes,” he said last week. “I think property taxes are very regressive, and I think that this is a great way to offset the property taxes that people are paying right now.”
Penny also recommended that Statesboro’s council approve the agreement, but he takes a more circumspect view of sales taxes.
“Some folks will say by using sales tax we are having people that come to our community (as shoppers, commuters and visitors) help us pay our way, but it also in some cases is a regressive tax because for lower-income people, they have to pay a higher percentage towards sales tax,” he said. “But again, it is a way to reduce property taxes.”
The county commissioners, during their regular meeting Tuesday morning, Aug. 19, and Statesboro City Council, during its meeting that evening, unanimously approved the FLOST agreement. County Attorney Jeff Akins reported that the Brooklet, Portal and Register councils had approved it the previous week.