In the first two of three required hearings over an almost 34% increase in Statesboro’s city property tax above this year’s official “rollback rate,” the city manager and mayor continued to cite, as the main reason, the split with the Bulloch County government more than a year ago over funding of fire departments.
If property values had remained the same, the proposed not quite 1-mill change in the city’s tax rate to 9.6 mills from the 2024 and 2025 rate of 8.625 mills would be an 11.3% increase. But under the Georgia law known as the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights, local governments must reduce their millage to counteract inflation in assessed property values or advertise any resulting increase as the full difference between the new rate and the potential rollback rate. Statesboro’s city rollback rate this year, as determined by the Bulloch County Board of Tax Assessors staff, would have been 7.165 mills. So, the net increase advertised in the city’s formal notices is 33.98%.
The last of the three hearings is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 15, in the council chambers at Statesboro City Hall. That’s also the start time of the regular meeting in which City Council can vote to set the millage rate. The first two hearings were held at noon at 6 p.m. Sept. 8.
Mayor Jonathan McCollar and a quorum of council members were present for both hearings. Very few members of the public attended either hearing, but one citizen at the first hearing and five at the second questioned or challenged the tax increase.
Both hearings began with a presentation by City Manager Charles Penny with a slideshow about the tax rates, city budget, and asserted reasons for the tax hike.
In the city’s fiscal year 2027 budget, approved by the council in June and in effect since July 1, total spending and revenue increased about 5% from the previous year. But the transfer in revenue from the general fund to the fire fund increased from $3.2 million last year to more than $7.4 million in the current budget, Penny reported.
“Basically what happened in July of 2025, Bulloch County decided to dissolve the fire district. With the elimination of the fire district, it also eliminated some $2.7 million that we would receive in revenue,” he said.
Fire service divorce
City and county officials have voiced differing opinions in regard to which governing body made the final decision leading to the divorce of their firefighting programs. But discussions for a renewal of a longtime intergovernmental agreement under which the county paid for the Statesboro Fire Department to provide primary fire response beyond the city limits for road five miles from each of two SFD stations broke down at the beginning of 2025.
Since July 1, 2025 the county government has used the revenue from its own fire service tax exclusively to fund the separate Bulloch County Fire Department, expanded to serve the entire county outside Statesboro. So, the county no longer pays a share to the city.
In addition to that estimated $2,755,000 loss of revenue, a three-year federal Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response, or SAFER, grant that the city was awarded in 2023 to hire an additional 12 full-time firefighters expired in August. That amounts to the loss of another $703,000 in annual funding.
So the city had a roughly $3.5 million shortfall in fire service revenue. The city leadership has made no cuts to the Statesboro Fire Department’s staffing, and the SFD in April attained an Insurance Services Office fire protection rating of Class 1, the best available, for its remaining service area, just to the city limits. That ISO rating took effect Sept. 1.
The city has also completed SFD Station 3 – with financing to be repaid from the Special Purpose Local Option Sales tax, known as SPLOST, not property tax – and is set to dedicate the new station Tuesday morning.
Aborted fire fee
At the beginning of 2026, Statesboro officials with assistance from a consulting firm explored the idea of charging a monthly fire service fee to all addresses to make up for the “gap,” first estimated at $4.3 million, in the SFD’s funding.
But the council shelved the fire fee idea in April after learning that some Georgia cities and counties have rescinded their fees and even had to make refunds after lawsuits from property owners. City Attorney Cain Smith warned that legal challenges would be nearly certain if Statesboro enacted such a fee.
After that, Penny suggested a 3.8-mill property tax hike might be necessary to keep the Fire Department and everything else fully funded.
But then a change in state law made the first five months revenue from the new 1% Floating Local Option Sales Tax available in the current fiscal year. When FLOST was originally approved by Bulloch County voters in a referendum last November, the revenue wasn’t expected to be available until full year’s worth had been collected after collection began in January 2026.
FLOST & growth help
Five months of early FLOST supplied roughly $1.4 million, and the city staff reduced the predicted property tax rate increase to 2.129 mills. Then growth in the tax digest – such as from construction of new businesses and homes and building improvements in the past year – came in at about 13% instead of the 8% prediction used in the original budgeting.
So, the city is left with a not quite 1-mill proposed property tax rate increase, after applying the $1.4 million from FLOST.
The budget this helps fund includes no new positions for additional employees in any city department, but it does provide a 2% across-the-board raise – Penny called it a “pay adjustment” – for existing positions.
It also continues pay-for-performance raises that can be awarded based on current employees’ annual evaluations.
‘How’d we get here?’
In a segment of his presentation entitled “How did we get here?” Penny returned to the fire department situation.
“This year the city realizes the full impact of Bulloch County’s decision to dissolve the Fire District,” he said. “Last year we covered the revenue loss with loans from the enterprise funds, and as I told you last year, that is unsustainable.”
Almost $3.2 million loaned to the general fund or fire fund from the city’s water-sewer, natural gas and solid waste collection coffers is scheduled to be paid back over 10 years.
Increased general fund expenditures Penny highlighted from the fiscal 2027 budget include $803,581 more for salaries and benefits, roughly $100,000 more for electricity for street lights, and $80,000 more for credit card processing fees.
Two other expenditure increases in the list have to do with camera technology for the Statesboro Police Department. After the expiration of the original three-year grant the city used to obtain Flock license-plate-reader cameras, the new five-year contract council recently approved with Flock Safety will add costs of about $170,000 this fiscal year. The separate FUSUS contract for a video-sharing network involving cameras at businesses and apartment complexes is estimated to cost about $80,000 more.
‘Rainy day’ target
Penny reported that the city’s general-fund balance is currently about 20% of its budgeted expenditures for the year, thus falling short of the council’s informal policy of maintaining a 25% balance. That margin is needed as a “rainy day fund” against natural disasters such as hurricanes and otherwise unexpected events, he said.
After the city officials heard from a few citizens opposed to the increase, Penny asserted that adopting the rollback rate would require eliminating about 60 jobs across all departments. At each hearing, he recommended the rate of 9.6 mills, up a shade less than 1 mill from the current 8.625.
Penny also predicted that “next year, the city will be able to reduce the millage rate by 2.1 mills” because of the $3.5 million it is projected to receive from a full year of FLOST.
District 4 Councilman John Riggs asked if saying council “will be able to reduce the millage” was the correct terminology.
“I thought that we were going to be forced to do that by law,” Riggs said, alluding to the state law authorizing FLOSTs.
“By law you’re going to have to, but the good part of it is that the sales tax will be sufficient to cover those costs,” Penny said.
Driveway conversation
Vester Mock, the only citizen to sign up and speak during the noon hearing, recalled a conversation Mayor McCollar had with him in his driveway before the FLOST referendum.
“You told me if I voted for this FLOST 1 percent sales tax that our millage rate was going to go down. …,” Mock said. “The first thing you did, y’all came out and increased the value of our home. It’s not worth no more than it was last year, but y’all said it was, so our taxes went up.”
As city officials noted, the county Board of Assessors and its appraisers determine the taxable value of property, not the city staff or council.
Saying that increasing the rate 1 mill this year while claiming the ability to decrease it 2 mills next year didn’t make any sense, Mock asked, “Why don’t you leave it the same?”
He and his wife, he noted, are living on Social Security.
“A hundred dollars don’t sound like much to y’all,” Mock said to city officials. “A hundred dollars, when I’m paying almost $200 a week on groceries for two people, is a lot of money. Living on a fixed income, a hundred dollars is a lot of money.”
To Mock’s assertion that the mayor had lied to him about FLOST lowering the millage rate, the mayor replied that circumstances had changed.
“When me and you talked, I gave you the God-honest truth,” McCollar said, “If we passed FLOST, we would be able to reduce the taxes. … The fact of the matter is, Bulloch County decided to end a 40- or 50-year contract that we had with them, and now not only has the city of Statesboro’s fire (department cost) gone up by millions of dollars, the county’s has gone up by millions of dollars.”
He said he had fought to keep the intergovernmental agreement in place.
The mayor went on to say that he is “very concerned about America right now” with decisions at the national level causing inflation in food and fuel costs and more people than ever needing the help of the local food bank.