April 11, 2025 A CY 2025 Proposed Tax Rate Public Hearing ofthe Russell County Board of Supervisors was held on Friday, April 11, 2025 at 6:00 PM at the Russell County Government Center in Lebanon, Virginia. CALL TO ORDER & ROLL CALL The Clerk called the meeting to order. Roll Call by the Clerk: Present - Andrew Hensley Lou Ann Wallace Tara Dye Steve Breeding ac quorum Rebecca Dye Nate Kiser David Eaton Absent - None Also, Present - Lonzo Lester, Clerk Rhonda Lester, Deputy Clerk INVOCATION, & PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE Invocation performed by Jacob Musick followed by the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. APPROVAL OF THE AGENDA Motion made by Steve Breeding, second Andrew Hensley and duly approved by the Board of Supervisors to approve the Agenda as presented. The vote was: Aye: Andrew Hensley, Lou Ann Wallace, Tara Dye, Steve Breeding, Rebecca Dye, Nate Kiser, and David Eaton Nay: None Abstain: None Absent: None PUBLICI HEARING 1. CY 2025 Proposed Tax Rate presented by Lonzo Lester, County Administrator. CITIZENS COMMENTS 1. Doug Mays, Lebanon - want to speak about senior citizens 67 and older. I think that their real estate taxes should be frozen at the age of 67. It's pretty hard to make ends meet with real estate taxes and power bills. 2. Angie McGlothlin, Honaker -1 would like to talk to you about taxes and how high they are and how rapi it makes it on senior citizens disabled people. Ineverworried a whole lot about taxes up until this year since my husband has been in and out of hospital and it's kind of thrown me into wondering what's going to happen if something happens to him. Ijust really would like for y'all to give us as much of a break as you can. realize that it takes money to run the county and I'm really glad that you're working and trying to find every possible way to cut. Senior citizens need the biggest break you can give, that's all I've got to say. Thank you. 3. Larry Hughes, Lebanon - I want to thank you for the work you do. You have a challenging job. I would not envyyour job. I do thank you for the work you are doing, but I think we do need to work on some things. I'd like to ask you some questions. What tax base should we have? What rate do we need? How much tax do we need to pay? Do we have any idea how much we're paying? What is the commonsense approach to how much we should pay? What should we pay on a dollar bill...10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 cents? We need taxes, but how much do we need? That's my question. Nowl don'tthink we're managing the budgets the waywe should be. That's my opinion. I don't want you to decrease the taxes, we need to bring things under control. We need every department to provide the board with a detailed description of the request for money. If they cannot give you a detailed balanced budget, I don't think) you need to give any raises to any of them. You should be managing this money, Thave got to manage my money. You have to manage what you have got. don'tthink you need to keep taking from the citizens what we cannot pay. That's all have to say. want to thank you. 4. Oris Christian, Lebanon - - want to let you know that I hope you sure God don't raise the rates of these taxes. Last year we paid $3,813.35. This year if you leave at that, we'd be paying $4,6244 because of the excess rate increase. 'm hoping that y'all will consider lowering the rate. This assessment value is not going to do anything to help it. To me, it's really making it hard on the average John Doe. 'm just hoping you consider the taxpayers. Everybody's got a wish list...well they should consider who's paying for that wish list, we the taxpayers. Thankyou. 5. Cody, Cleveland - I - am here to talk about the taxes. As we all know, probably everybody got a significant increase on their tax assessment. I'm not sure that every citizen of this county would have been savvy enough to know to sort of appeal that and get that down. We've tried to advocate people that we know to do that and hopefully that's helped. I've heard the number 40% is kind of a ballpark average of what most people saw on an increase. Now I don't have all the data that you guys might have to see what that actual number would be, but judging from my assessment I'd say that's pretty close. I do know some were getting north of 50%. That's a huge increase in taxes at a time most of our citizens in this county are struggling to make ends meet...with four years of severely high inflation as you guys probably well know. Me and my wife were just discussing today about budgeting our grocery bill and it's astronomical considering we've got three small children that have not hit the teenage years yet. So, I'm looking at next year that bill's about to be a lot worse. Something certainly, - want you guys to consider is to do what you can to get that rate down. Not just down for a number that looks good. I know that the current is 63 cents per 100. Bringing that down may look good on paper but if it ends up still being a tax increase for me and the rest of the county then it's still raising taxes. So, - just figured this based on 40% sO this is more of a model that would askyou guys to go through with more accurate data. lappreciate y'all, thanky you. 6. Sandy Hess, Swords Creek - First, I would like to apologize to the people that came tonight thinking thaty you all were voting on thati tonight. That's what we thought, that's what we understood. So, I appreciate everybody coming. You need to come back when they actually do vote on it. know what we're going to hear. Mr. Lester is going to give us a very in-depth detailed report of how bad things are. I understand the regional jail's going to cost us $200,000 more, electric bills for all the county offices, transportation, gas and everything. know we're going to hear a lot of that tonight. I know it's in the paper that DSS needs another $250,000, because they must come back multiple times a year and ask for money for CSA for foster care. So, ify you fund us right in the beginning maybe that won't happen. We never know how many foster care kids we're going to have. We understand you are not in an easy position for sure. Idon't envy you for anything that you've had to deal with in the last two years, but) you do have to realize where these people are coming from, where I'm coming from, where everybody's coming from. At DSS, we have seen more people come in struggling with their electric bills than l've ever seen in the 20 years I've been there, It's outrageous. People are choosing between keeping their electricity on or buying their food and medicine. It's not right. - know that you all have to do what) you have to do. The county, I've heard, will never go back to the way it was a few years ago when you were running on borrowed money and 1 understand that. - still believe that with the revenue that comes into the county even at 50 cents that would still give a significant increase in county revenue. 50 cents to 55 cents would be doable for most people and I think there's stuff that can still be cut. appreciate the board members that cut everything they can. Ithink other ones can cut more, butlknow the teachers deserve that 1% raise. They absolutely do...if that 1% raise is not working into this budget, then the raise they got last year closing Swords Creek and Copper Creek was just a waste of time. Because, ifthey don't keep those steps then they're never going to catch up with the other counties. I believe whatever we can do that the teachers' raises have to be worked in. There has to be a way...people are really struggling. 60 cents is not acceptable..its, just not acceptable. Thank you. 7. JJ Eaton, Nash Ford -1 sit on the school board here in Russell County. To echo some of the stuff that Sandy said, I do not envy any of you all and I do know how hard it is for a lot of folks in our county with power bills and just the cost of living. I just got groceries out here at Walmart last night and came out with 10 bags, it was about $300. lunderstand that the cost of living went up and I am not for raising these taxes. I understand that and our people can't take it. But as far as the teachers go, thanks to you all and the school system for doing the cut that they done last year we was able to implement that step. That step is SO important. It was cut out almost 15 to 20 years ago and our teachers were stuck exactly where they were at. There were no raises from year to year and they could drive 15to 20 minutes to the next surrounding county and make $10,000 more. We have closed that gap tremendously. Now with that being said, we are asking for that step program to be put back in the budget this year. The 1% we're asking for averages around $200,000. We're asking for that extra 1% to add to the 3% the state is sending. That will give us an extra boost, but we're still behind. People want to holler about our central office, we have less in our central office right now than we ever have. We've got less central office employees than any surrounding county that you want to look at. When we look at our numbers, we are not overstaffed. Our classrooms are bursting at the seams, andl would invite any of you all to come with me to these schools. You can attest by looking at these classrooms. At the bare minimum, we're 18 to1 student/teacher ratio. Some of these classrooms are bursting out the seams with 23 or 24 kids. In our three-year-old program, some classes have two and three aids. We're not overstaffed by any means. Now with that being said, the teachers that will be retiring this year will not be replaced. We have moved employees around. For example, a guidance counselor leaves, instead of hiring another one we moved onet from another school and will split their time between each one. We move people around the whole county to try to make it work. We've consolidated bus routes, which has saved a lot of money. Unfortunately, we're havingto cut out some programs due to low participation. That has saved money. We have cut and cut and cut. lwould invite any of you all to come and sit down with us and we will showyou everything that we've done. Iwill continue to advocate for our teachers and our entire staff, because when you invest in those employees that live in this county that's who pays your taxes, that's who buys these groceries, that's who buys the gas in this county, and that's who reinvests back to you all. So, I look at the school system as an investment. Ifyou make that investment, you will get a return onyourinvestment. Theywill spend back here, they will keepyou all going. The more money you give them the more money they're able to spend. So, lencourage you all to look at this budget. don't envy you all in any way. Ido askyou to please work this in this budget sO we can make this happen for our employees in the school system. Thankyou. 8. Lynn Hess - - - appreciate the job that you all do. I hope when Mr. Lester does his presentation, he will give us the number our county ended last year...surplus or a deficit. Let us know exactly where we were at when we had 63 cents per 100 on our real estate. My number is 47 cents per 100 now with the increased value. think it's average of 44% is what I read somewhere. If we drop it back down to 47 cents, that will put us about where we were last year as far as the amount of taxes that we paid. Nowl personally don't expect you to do that. iknow our county needs al little bit more moneyto operate. You haven't had at tax raise in several years, but over 50isj just going too far in my opinion. think three cents more than 47 would give you a surplus on your budgets. It would also help fund things. I don't see a whole lot of businesses busting out the door to get in here, but we got shell buildings sitting around that have nothing in them. Let's tryt to just maintain our county and think about those of us that are on fixed incomes. I'm a disabled coal miner and ask you to consider that. When you're on a fixed income, it's hard to make ends meet from month to month. With the prices of everything, we need to really look hard at this. The county has been prosperous think for the last few years as far as the growth. I'm talking about good quality morals and standards in our county. Take a look at everything that you can and try to keep these taxes down sO that us poor people can afford it. lappreciate it. Thank you. 9. Jennifer Chumbley - PIL be quick. - don't envy your jobs at all in this instance. I know how this goes, I once stood before you and said would be willing to pay higher taxes for no landfill. l'm still at that. I know that we have people with fixed incomes that's been said. iknowit's goingt to be hard and the price of everything has risen and there's not a lot of choice. Yourj job is to preserve the county no matter what, sO I don't envy you. appreciate all the work y'all are doing with this, sO thank you. 10. Alicia McGlothlin, Honaker - I see both sides of this. work with the numbers every day. I see where you're at with your budgets. I 1 see what the revenue comes in and I see the expenditures. I know no one on this board wants to raise taxes, I know you don't and that's not a goal of anybody's. It's not a goal of nine either, but - would like for us to be able to do more for our senior citizens and disabled. Ithink if we could sit down and look at that program to see what we could do to help them. see the revenues, I see the expenditure side, but I also see the elderly and disabled come in my office. They have a hard time paying and we try to set them up on payment plans, but that doesn't wave penalty and interest. If they're late, they still have to pay for that. It's heartbreaking to see them come in and we try to work with them every' way we can. Iwould like to see us to be able to look at that program and see ifthere's more that we can do for our senior citizens and our disabled people. appreciate all ofy you. Iknowyou've got a hard job ahead of you, because see the numbers and know what you're facing. Thank you. 11. Josh Burgess, Cleveland - Thank y'all for what you do. I'm going to say a few things that y'all atready know. Just to put it straight forward, you got three things here that could be a problem, and it takes all three for the county to work. It takes all three for al household to work or al business. So, to work, you have revenue, you have a margin, and you have your spending. You've got a problem if it's not working out for you. They all have to work together, or one can overcome them all. Ifit's working, your revenue stream is excellent, you're treating everybody good, and business is good, your spending is not such a problem and your margin's not such a problem. Your margin comes in as your taxes. You want to raise your taxes sO) y'all need to raise your margin, that means you've got a problem. You either have a spending problem or you've got a revenue problem. Anybody can look through the county and tell spending could be a problem. One thing that I realized is just sitting in this room to break it down, we're actually sitting in a strip mall. Why does the government need a strip mall to conduct our business? How often is this area used? The room's not full, but we could hold this thingin al barn and the people would still showup. Itis very comfortable here and thank y'all for the accommodation, but is it necessary? You've got to look at what's necessary as far as the revenue goes. I would kind of urge y'all to focus on the businesses that are here in the county already and try to help and coach and make connections for those people. We showupl here once or twice a year to pay our taxes and sometimes we get a smile and a thank you. There have been some offices in this building that have gone leaps and bounds for me and coached me and offered support and want to thank them forthat. Try to keep the businesses that you have in the county, And try to attract new businesses. Please, if it's a threat to anybody's health, environment, water, or air, do not go down that path. It will run the rest of us off. You'll have a short-lived business when all your anchor businesses give up and leave. I can speak on the taxes versus electric rates, this past month I paid $5,200 out of a small business. Howlong can we do that? So, you either have a problem with revenue, spending or your margin. I would urge you to please stay away from the margin. Thank you very much. 12. Phillip McGlothun - I just want to say I envy none of you guys. I do appreciate everything that you do. Hopefully you guys will be able to continue to work. I've worked with the county a long time and l've seen the years that we kicked the can down the road and got ourselves in a mess on health insurance. Then we had to come back to our teachers and citizens to say it went up on you $200 or $300 that) year. The otheri thing is, we'vereally not seen the tax revenue of Simmons and Tate startto come in, sO hopefully you know we can see more from that. We wanted to see transparency and I'lL be honest tonight - appreciate the chairman for allowing me to come back up here after you sort of shut that down. Maybe a year or two ago you would have said well the citizen comments are over. - think this was sort of a town hall like setting. Interactingy with the people sitting here, Ithinkis a good thing andlappreciate you still allowing people to say something. My prayers are with you. Let's see we get this worked out for the best of our citizens. work in the school system a lot and I have family that works in the school system SO I see how they struggle. Maybe a wife and a husband both work in the school system, I see how they might struggle to make it on what they made. I'm definitely on board with us not doing anything against our teachers or our staff. appreciate you guys. Thank you SO much. 13. Dave Miller - one of the things that I've been talking to some of y'all individually about that may help the county is: are we certain we are collecting all the money that we're supposed to collect with regard to property? It seems like we may be 10% short on the amount of acres that's in the county versus the amount of acres we should be collecting property taxes on. So, when things like that come up, we need to probably identify what we need to do to fix that quickly. Let's sayi it's been going on for part two, sO we missed out on revenue from the county standpoint. It may be half of what JJ was asking fori that we should have got in revenue in the last year that we didn't. Can we work together to figure out a way? We identified it, now what are we going to do? When we're short 30 or 40,000 acres on what should be taxed versus what's being taxed, what are we going to do to fix it? It really needs to be fixed before the next go, because how much revenue are we losing? We may not have as big a gap as we think. I've talked to a lot of you individually, but what are we going to do about it and how do we fix it? Sometimes we see things happen, but sometimes it's hard to get that ball moving. don't want to harp on the PSA as an example, but it's hard to get that ball moving to get something fixed. So now we've identified it and I'd be glad to meet with any of you individually or collectively or whatever to go through what 1 went through with Lonzo and those guys. Lowering the rate a little bit right now is not going to help the people whose assessment went to 75%, The point is if we can find money that we should be getting anyway, shouldn't we be really laser focused on that and get that moving? just want to make that comment public. Can I do something to help? If it's $100,000 a year for the last 10 years...do the math, it's a million dollars that we should have gotten. BOARD DISCUSSIONS & REMINDERS Andrew Hensley -1 appreciate everybody coming out. We're going to get your taxes low. - ain't going to vote to raise yourtaxes. I've talked to people and theirworried abouti their taxes and people can only stand SO much. They ride through town, what's the three nicest things they see government, banks, and churches. That tells you where the money's at. Now there's plenty of stuff here we can cut. Lonzo says he's cut to the bone; told him to cut on through the bone. So, we're getting the bone saw out and we're going to set it right here in a day or two. Y'all pray. lappreciate it. Lou Ann Wallace = Questions regarding some line items Tara Dye - Questions regarding some line items Steve Breeding - I just want to say it's been a constant effort here for the last week and probably the next week or sO to try to get to a point..we're looking everywhere trying to reduce these things. Isee one categoryin this land use and it's under local non-taxable that's the only category that actually drops a little bit. It's nontax sO it really doesn't impact us. Everything else is just to the degree. As you can see when you look at that chart, the burden is on residential families because basically: a lot oftheirevaluations are, going on comparable sales, Something you've heard about some sale prices people coming in one time offering $30,000 more than what the asking price is, that hurts and that's the reason some of these are up like that. But it's a good thing that our property is worth more. It's a bad thing that we're going to have to pay more. Really the tax rate is going to come down, but the net effect is that you're going to pay more on the property. We're trying to get that down as low as we can. I'm in that 49% category, but I can't complain because myi insurance company tells us it's more than what it's appraised to rebuild it. We are working on it and we'll continue to work on it try to do the best we can. Rebecca Dye - None Nate Kiser -I want to thank everybody that came out tonight and spoke. lwish there were more spoke. We do want to hear what you have to say. We want to knowl howyou feel about things and how you feel we should spend your taxpayer dollars. None of this is free. None of the things that the county does is free, it's all your money, SO we want to know how you expect us to spend that. I've had a lot of conversations with people on the phone and text and some on Facebook and I do appreciate everyone's input, because it does help us get an idea of what you expect and what you want to see us do. do think there's some areas that we've already made some progress tonight, sounds like. There's potentially some more progress we can make. Every 140,000 we could shave off the penny with the new assessment at gross you're looking at around the 170 range. So for every 170 is a penny off of your tax rate SO it sounds like we've already shaved a few pennies tonight. Maybe we can shave a few more pennies. Iran on low taxes. want no tax increase for anyone, but we do have to meet our obligations. So, we're going to do everythingy we can to gett there. Thankyou all. David Eaton - appreciate everybody for coming out and we've had some great engagement just always remember you can call us if you want to have any discussion beyond this. One oft the things want the board to consider, l've been in conversation with Mr. Breeding and Mr. Lester about hiring an attorney in house. We're going to run the numbers on it. They would be able to handle the IDA and us. know the school's got their own, sO we can't go there because there's a divide there between the school and us that would be a conflict. We'll provide all that information to the board to see if we could save money by having somebody internally on staff. One of the reasons I'd like to do that if it saves money is because of a lot ofthese large projects thaty we're looking at working onto have the experience and knowledge on a daily basis and not have to bring the attorneyin and have to have these discussions and catch them up to speed on all this stuff. Ifyou had somebody there on a consistent basis to handle some of these big-ticket items that would not only have the information that's required. We still might have to hire outside legal counsel on a couple of them that are knowiedgeable in regard to some of these things, but I just want to bring that to the full board's attention. We'll probably have to put out a notice or make a motion to put that out to see if we have any bites on somebody that would want to do that. It might be something that we want to take up at our next meeting. ADIOURNMENT Motion made by Steve Breeding, second Andrew Hensley, and duly agreed by the Board of Supervisors to adjourn at 7:57 PM to reconvene on Tuesday April 15, 2025 at 6:00 PM. The vote was: Aye: Andrew Hensley, Lou Ann Wallace, Tara Dye, Steve Breeding, Rebecca Dye, Nate Kiser, and David Eaton Nay: None Abstain: None Absent: None The next regular monthly meeting is scheduled for Monday, May 5, 2025 at 6:00 PM. Clerk of the Board Chairperson