 Welcome to Athens Politics Nerd. In this video, I've got an interview with Mayor Kelly Gerds for you. We're going to break down the 2020 Athens-Clarke County budget. It was a lot of work and you know I'd seen 12 budgets as a county commissioner. It was different to me on this end of the process. There's some great stuff in there like fair free buses for seniors, a new office of inclusion, and funding for a plan to get us to 100% renewable energy. First I'll go over some budget basics and then we'll explore the cool stuff in the budget with Mayor Gerds. Here we go. Our local government's budget is split into a bunch of smaller budgets with the biggest piece being the general fund. The general fund is basically a catch-all for anything that doesn't have its own fund. We're talking about basic government services like police, fire, the courts. That's $136.2 million in FY 2020. By the way, the FY stands for fiscal year which begins and ends on July 1st. Okay, the total across all funds this year is $245.1 million, which is $2.5 million more than last year. That's broken down like so. The biggest slice is public works and that's things like roads, bridges, water, and sewers. Next is general government which are mostly employee salaries and benefits and then comes public safety and the courts and there are a few smaller slices too. Now let's talk about revenue. The local government raises money for general expenditures mostly through taxes like property and sales taxes but they have other methods too. For example, there are charges for services like our water bills, parking fees, summer camps and whatnot. Anything we have to pay to use counts in this slice and it's actually one of the biggest slices of revenue. Okay, I often hear worries that our sales tax base is shrinking as businesses formerly on Atlanta Highway head to Oconee County. This is partially true of course and the good news is that even with Best Buy and those other shops having moved our sales tax base is still growing slightly in real terms. Our property tax base on the other hand is growing at an amazing rate 8.8% last year. As without a rate increase they didn't raise taxes. Property values are just rising that much. Something else I hear is a concern about how much higher our property taxes are in Athens than they are in surrounding counties but looking at nearby cities this isn't actually true and once you account for our higher homestead exemptions the final amount we pay for the same property value is less than most nearby cities. Again it's those higher property values that are causing people to pay more. It's not the rates set by the county. Okay let's go over the cool stuff that's in this budget with Mayor Kelly Gertz. First we've got the new office of inclusion funded with $170,000 in this budget. That office will have both some inward facing activity that they'll be involved in in the government to ensure that we're thinking about bias as employees of the government and then there'll be a lot of external facing work too making sure that we're simply getting out to the various parts of the community until we're not just getting one perspective or small handful of perspectives but we're hearing from everybody. Part of the responsibilities of this office would be to act as liaison to a civil rights committee. There would be nine members who would be directly appointed by a variety of community organizations such as the Athens Area Discrimination Movement and WACP, Athens Pride, Georgia Options, Council on Aging and others and then there'd be three members who would just be mayor and commissioner appointees at liaisons and then it would be staffed by the director of the Inclusion and Diversity Office. Okay so the the MCIS advisory board would be not like house within that office but they would be working together. That's right yes so that office would be the sort of staff liaison to the advisory body so they'd be the direct ongoing link. Next Mayor Gertz included $54,000 in the budget to expand funding for elections. This funding will let us expand early voting days and polling locations. It will also make the elections coordinator a full-time position so they can react more quickly to address any problems that arise. Then another really interesting thing in the budget was the workforce investment program. There's $150,000 embedded in the budget right now separate from the prosperity package which may bolster this even further depending on how that conversation goes and the goal is high-wage, high-demand jobs. So there are a lot of positions right now that employers will tell anybody they're having a hard time filling. The electricians positions, diesel mechanics, CDL drivers, all positions that pay more than double the median income in the county and so what we're going to try and do is move some of our most struggled residents here into those jobs by subsidizing some training for them and then what we want to do is get a pipeline for those local residents to not only get trained but move into those positions that are open. There's also funding for a full-time housing coordinator position to support the creation and management of affordable housing in Athens. What would they do exactly and how would this additional affordable housing be funded? So I anticipate that swast will be one of the areas that they'll be supporting you know in putting nearly 45 million dollars into affordable housing over a decade through swast we're simply going to be putting a lot more money into affordable housing than has been historically true at least in my 12 years on the county commission before I was mayor and so ensuring that those units are permanently affordable that there's a good screening process to kind of make sure that we are in fact finding people who are eligible for affordable housing is something that existing housing providers already do but those organizations don't have staff large enough right now to do even more screening and even more analysis that's going to have to be required when we build a much more affordable housing than we have on ground right now so this staff person will do some of that training and coordination and screening anticipate in addition to the swast package we'll have some tax allocation district revenue that will specifically be targeted at affordable housing. Fairfee for seniors people with disabilities and county employees was included in this budget as well at a cost of $94,000 but what about Fairfee for everyone? I think the question of Fairfee for everyone kind of involves sort of how structurally and functionally that will happen so one of the things that could happen we could have a designated segment of tees floss that's a transit local option sales tax and that could provide not only for capital expenses but also operating expenses should we have a transit local option tax that might be just a portion of a penny it might be a quarter of a penny and we might do a traditional tees floss for lack of a better phrase with the other three quarters of a penny so we would increase the tax burden on the population but that would allow us to more easily move into a fairfee environment for everybody and then we could address institutional partners like the university I think there are a lot of moving pieces there and certainly the question of what a universal fairfee environment would look like is still on the table. This budget also includes $70,000 to develop a plan to get us to 100% renewable energy learn more about that plan here thanks for watching and thanks to all my patrons who make this show possible you can become a patron at patreon.com slash Athens politics nerd have a great day