We are recording. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of the council. This is our second public hearing for the FY22 military. We did provide you a copy of the presentation tonight, the agenda report, as well as the consolidated annual evaluation tax digest for both the maintenance and operations as well as the parks bond millage rate. And then there is a separate memo which provides a little bit more insight into the millage rate, the purpose of the millage rate and additional background. I'm going to go through the same PowerPoint that I did in the first public hearing earlier this morning. By way of background, Fulton County assesses the value of all real and personal property. Assessed value is defined as 40% of the fair market value. And then the assessed value of all property in a taxing jurisdiction is referred to as the tax digest. The tax digest can change on an annual basis in one of two ways. The first is by reassessments and reassessments of existing properties are capped at a maximum increase of 3%. Or secondly, the tax digest can increase because of growth, and that would be the reflection of new homes and new businesses. Annually the city council sets the military based on the value of the tax digest to generate revenues to pay for essential city services. As stated in the agenda report, we encourage you to view this rate setting session not as an annual reconciliation of the fiscal year, but rather a funding strategy to generate revenues to provide essential services. a funding strategy to generate revenues to provide essential services. Again, the next slide, again, the memo provides a little bit more detail as to the purpose of the millage rate, but at a very high level, millage rates are levied against the tax digest by each taxing jurisdiction. And right now, the school board, as well as the county and all of the cities in Fulton County are going through the process of establishing their milled rate for FY22. Millage rates are stated in dollars per 1,000 of net assessed value, and the example provided is a milled rate of 5.000 mills would be $5 for every 1,000 of net assessed value or $200. of net assessed value or $200. According to the State Department of Revenue, the average county and municipal millage rate in 2021 totaled about 30 mills. On this slide we illustrate for you the various components of the millage rate that was paid by property owners within the city of Johns Creek. The schools accounted for 56% or 7.796 mills, the county 31% or 9.899, and the city was the remaining 11% at 3.986. This next slide shows you historically what the millage rate has been for the city of Johns Creek since its inception in 2006. For the first 10 years of the existence of the city's annual millage rate, it was held steady at 4.614. Most recently in fiscal year 20 and 21, we've held the adoptive rate steady at 3.986. This slide shows you then how you, excuse me, how revenue is generated based on the amount of the tax digest and the adopted millage rate. I want to highlight again in the example that I said for the first 10 years of the city's existence, how the millage rate was held steady at 4.614%. Just because the millage rate is the same does not mean that it generates the same amount of property tax in any annual levy. I'll highlight as we show on this slide in fiscal year 2009, a milled rate of 4.614 generated 14.8%, 14.8 million, I'm sorry, in property tax levies. And that was given the value of the tax digest, a 2.3 million variance between the high and the low with the same military rate. The current millage rate 3.986, now based on the value of the tax digest, would generate approximately 20.8 million in property tax levies. As indicated in your gender report, that is 2.3 million more than what was budgeted for the current fiscal year. On this slide, we highlight that property tax revenue is a very critical component of the general fund revenue base. It provides about critical component of the general fund revenue base. It provides about 30% of the general fund revenue base and the large part of that goes towards funding public safety, police and fire, as well as city administration. This 30% revenue base also provides additional funding for capital and enhancements. We've had a high just looking back a few years, about 7.6 million in fiscal year 19. But in the current year budget, we were only able to fund 1.2 million given the forecasted revenue projections. Thirdly, the general fund revenue based property tax derived from property tax would provide funding for council identified strategic priorities. This next slide highlights for you then the 2021 millage rates that were adopted within Fulton County. When you look at all of the counties within the Fulton County area, they range from a high of 15.729, the adopted rate for hapeville to the low end of Johns Creek 3.986. The one that was a little slighter higher than Johns Creek was Roswell at 4.618. The overall average of all of the cities in Fulton County was 8.529. And when you consider the average of five cities in North Fulton County, Alfreda Johns Creek, Milton, Roswell, and Sandy Springs, that average was 4.6000, all of this for fiscal year 2021. Note that John's Creek adopted rate of 3.986 is lower than both of those averages. Overall, the tax digest for fiscal year 22 grew by 5.4 million. It's about a 9.5% increase from 2021. The majority of the increase came from reassessments, again 66% year-year increase. But again, as I stated in the beginning for existing property owners, the reassessment is capped at 3%. So the max that they would receive in their property tax bill is capped at a 3% impact. And then the balance of the growth and the tax taxes came from growth, or 34% which was 159 million from the prior year. The adopted and proposed military that was circulated and advertised in the paper was 3.986 for the maintenance and operating budget and then for the parks bond a proposed military of 0.00390 mills or 0.039 per 1000 of assessed value. This again is the second public hearing and the third public hearing where we're proposing to adopt the military for 2022 is stated for August 15th to the 2022 at 17. That concludes my comments. Thank you, Director Campbell. And with that, I'd like to open, well, first of all, council, would you like to hold your questions or wait until after the public hearing? I would like to reserve, Mayor. Any objections to that? Okay. With that, I'd like to open the public hearing for the 2022 milled rate. All those wishing to speak on this matter, please come forward. But I hear I'm undimited. No, that's okay. I'm not going to be unlimited. But let me come before, my name's Royce Veronica, I live at 9830, Farmer, Plain and Josh Grete. Some of you may know me, some of you may not. But let me kind of express how a resident in the city reads your agenda reports and how they interpret it. And I hope you'll humor me and kind of read along with the agenda report with me to kind of understand my thinking. The first thing I'd like to point out was that it's my current understanding that the county and the cities are negotiating the allocation of your local sales tax at 1%. This is an elephant in the room in a year. If it affects us this year or it doesn't, okay? If it doesn't, it should be stated in here. We don't have to worry about it for this budget. If it isn't, then everything is trash from this point on, because if it affects you, you have to take that into account in your decision of what should be the military. If you're going to be losing a significant portion, you know, I understand the county saying, hey, we want a third of it. I can tell you, I read the paper, Chatham County Tulsa Van, and we want 50 percent of it. So this is no thing to ignore in this whole budget process. So your first thing your agenda report has to say, is this effect this year's budget or not so that you can take it into consideration? Okay, second on. This is a great sales pitch. Okay, and so is the presentation. It's a great sales pitch. Okay, and so is the presentation. It's a great sales pitch for a tax increase. But that should not be the job of the city to sell you on a tax increase. It should be their job in the gender report to present the facts so that you can make a decision and not be guided by a nose ring to do what the city wants you to do. You're the policy makers, okay? So let's read this document as a resident of Johns Creekwood, okay? It starts off well. Staff recommends maintaining the existing military of 3.986 for fiscal year 20 to generate revenues necessary to provide government services, as well as provide funding for improvements. We can strike that plan but unfund it. Okay, if they're not authorized, why are we putting money aside for things that we haven't even decided we're gonna do? And I'll get that later in another paragraph here. But that's the purpose of what we're trying to do. and I'll get that later in another paragraph here. But that's the purpose of what we're trying to do. Staff further recommends setting the park bond milled rate at 0.390 for physical year 22, which will cover the park bond that service payments. It was a missing sentence here, plus it will collect an additional $3331,452 to spend elsewhere, or not on bond service, and that's kind of deceptive. Okay, so let's state that up front. The military can be considered for adoption following three public hearings, which have been advertised to be held July 25th morning, right now in August 15th. So it continues background. Property taxis are levied against the tax digest to generate revenues to provide governmental services for city operations. Property taxes constitute roughly one third of the city's general front revenue base and provide the means by which capital projects are funded in city operations. That's not a true statement. Money is fungible. You're taking your revenue from all sorts of sources to pay for a capital project. It's not just the property tax that's paying for it. So you can strike that part of it. Property taxes are levied by mills, and the rate is commonly referred to as the millage rate. The attached memorandum provides additional background material on the millage rate in historical context. The current millage rate is $3.986 for every $1,000 of net value. It continues. John Street millage Rate is the lowest solid vintage rate in full county has completely irrelevant statement. Because every city has different exemptions amounts and provides different services. So you cannot compare the millage rate here to the milligrate in Alferrata. In Alferrata, everybody gets a $50,000 homestead extension off the top. Okay? So that's a trade-off, whether you want higher milligrate and higher exemptions or a lower milligrate and lower exemptions. Okay? So you cannot compare, these are not apples, apples comparison and a sales pitch. Okay. So it continues. This month, Fold and County provided the preliminary 2022 tax for reference. The overall value of property in Johns Creek has increased 9.5%. The majority of the change in the amount is attributable to reassessment of existing real property. That is a key statement. 66% of your digest increase was due to increase the assessments on existing homeowners. So forget about that capping thing. 66% of it is coming from existing homeowners. We've had growth, but that's only one third of the additional property tax we'd be receiving. Okay. And he says that the balance of the changes due to other changes to the digest and that's the growth. Okay. Historically, the tax digest is grown by approximately $70 million per year as a result of new residential and commercial properties being built in the city. The growth shows the desirability of John Screek as a location and as we turn to normal pre-pandemic levels, which is a true statement. We've had 30% growth in our tax digest due to additional assessments and construction. The fiscal year budget planned for anticipated 18.5 million in revenues from property taxes. That's a completely irrelevant statement. Who cares what the 2020 budget said? Based on the increase in value of the digest, maintaining the current village rate of 3.986, we generate approximately $20.8 million more. Or stated in other words, if we maintain the same millage rate, we are going to raise the revenue collected from property taxes by 9.4%. That's a big chunk. That's a 9.4% increase in revenue to the city coming from the property tax system. So and that's the important thing to understand that we're proposing a 9.4% increase and he bets I think he used a number 9.5 actually but next page Next page. As the council considers setting the milled rate, it should not be viewed as a reconciliation tool for any single budget year. Hooray. That is a correct statement. This council got the rail when it was thinking that this was just, oh, we're just looking back, but respectively, and handing money back. It's not a true statement. We're planning for the future. We're planning how much money we want to collect. We're planning how much we want to build. What facilities want to build? It's a forward looking number. We're not going to go back next year and say, oh, don't we're going to change the number? No, this is a planning number to go forward over to a crying the plan of budget. Okay. And what it really is, it's the primary determinant of the size of the city's unallocated funds, unallocated reserves. That's what you're really doing is you're deciding the size of the unallocated reserve. That's what the property taxes are doing for you when you do that. Because we don't have a balanced budget that says income matches, Outgo, we have a balanced budget that says income, Outgo, amount coming out of reserves. And it's that amount coming out of reserves that you are deciding when you pass the military. You can decide to add the reserves. You can decide to lower reserves in that funding process. Once you set your budget, you can decide to lower reserves in that funding process. Once you set your budget, you can say, if we pass this millage rate, we can increase our reserves or we can kind of suck it up because we have a lot of reserves. And that's the point to understand. You can then skip the next paragraph, completely irrelevant, and then jump to the next paragraph, completely irrelevant, and then jump to the third paragraph. Since the adoption of the fiscal 22 budget, a new mayor and four new council members have been elected. At the strategic planning retreat in January, the mayor and council identify five strategic priorities, town center, peace, blast, town center, T-SPLOST, economic development, Colleague Park and Legacy Center, in 19th-secondary and ongoing projects to propel the city forward. Although T-SPLOST II strategic priority has a dedicated revenue stream, and the first phase of Colleague Park is funded, full implementation of the strategic initiatives require additional funding. For example, the first year of the town center vision and master plan includes $15 million of projects. The second phase of Coal-Equick Park has no identified funding. Additionally, while T-SPLUS2 provides the first 16.5 million to fund sidewalks and trails, the sidewalk prioritization matrix includes $100 million sidewalks across the city. Okay, for the Legady Center, although the scope and scale of the facility has not been finalized, the original study anticipated the facility would cost at least $50 million to construct. What are we doing? Are we raising taxes for unapproved projects here? Have we decided we're going to build a legacy center? Have we decided we're going to build a $50 million legacy center? If you read any of those reports, they tell you right up front that's completely financially unvoiled. Just go to their website and tell you that. Okay. I mean, I pointed out we'll never build all these sidewalks. We're never going to spend a hundred million dollars to put a sidewalk on every road in John's Creek. It doesn't make sense. So to say we should be accumulating money for pie in the sky projects is not the point. That should not be why we are doing this. Okay? And that's the sales pitch. Let's raise money so that we can have a ton of money to do pie in the sky junk. Okay? Let's be realistic about what we're going to do and let's fund what we're going to do and that's what you should be doing in the budget process When you're deciding the capital projects you want to build are really truly viable not playing this guy stuff So let's continue Although it can be argued that additional capital projects and efforts to fund the strategic parties can be completed over time or funded by future revenues. With the projects identified at this time, the milledrate could be held at a study 3.986. And the 2.8 million of revenues over the original expectation could be allocated to unassigned balance at this time is what it should say. Okay? Because that's what you're doing. You're putting it in unassigned balances. You're not dedicating it to build a legacy center or to build sidewalks forever. So let's go back to what you're really doing. Yeah, we can raise more money and put it in unassigned funds. Okay? No. Furthermore, due to the floating homestead exemptions, the increased 20 homeowner for the primary homestead would not exceed 3% more than the prior year's assessment. Even if the reassessment of the property value was 1.3%, not quite a true statement. That 3% cap is a piece of that legislation, but it's retroactive. Okay, so if it didn't go up 3% of the previous year, they can jump and make more. So I'm sure you all received your handy-dandy little assessment from our Deer Tax Commission. I hope you all read these things. My tax, if you keep it constant, is going up 4.1%. Where'd that 3% cap come from? Here's a 3% cap in here. So you really need to understand how that works. And I'm lucky, mine's only going 4.1%. But across the board, reassessments are increasing 6.1% in John's Creek if you run the numbers. So you can ask yourself, well, how can that happen if we're out of 3% cap? It's going up 6.1%. Okay. So I hope you all run your computations and calculate. Okay. So continuing from there, let's go to the bottom statement. Now parenthetically it says, staff recommends adopting a milligrate of 3.986 of net assess value and, this just came out of blue, a park spawn milligrate of 0.390 per thousand dollars of net assess value for fiscal year 2023. Why? Why is that recommended? Shouldn't your agenda report tell you a little bit more of why we want the parks bond bill is rated to be .3 down? What's the justification? It's going to collect an additional $300,000. What are we going to spend it on? Are we going to tell the public, oh, by the way, you know that money that we told you that you're paying park spawn to pay off a bond? There's another 300,000 that is not going to pay off the bond. Now, do you really want to be deceptive and tell that to the public? I don't think that flies. I think the expectation in John's Creek is that we authorize the park spawned and that we are paying that park spawn off. And that that is the purpose of the park bond, millichrate. If we want to fund more parks, then that should come out of the general fund or you should pass another park bond. Okay, but this is an obligation to fiduciary obligation of the city to pay off that bond. So having read through that agenda report, let's run some numbers. In 2021, a .3986 milligrate against the, I'm sure you all have this handy-dandy sheet, followed by your rollback rate sheet, which I got here somewhere. Would it raise $19,606,194 last year? If you took that milled rate, times the assess value of the time. So if you now move it forward and you use the rollback rate of 0.3756 and you multiply times the new assess value of 5,383,629,368 dollars. Full of numbers there. You're going to get a revenue of 20,220,882 dollars. That's a 3.1 percent increase. Why is that? Because the rollback rate allows you to increase your property attacks from new properties. OK? So the rollback rate isn't collecting the same amount as last year. It's collecting more because we had growth. Here we go. And if you keep a constant at .3986, and now you're collecting money from both existing and new owners, then you're going to connect $21,459,150, which you multiply the numbers on. And that's a 9.4% increase. Okay? So 3.1% of the increase is coming from new growth, and 6.3% is coming from existing homeowners. Okay. So where did that cap of 3% go? Interesting. So I know, keep those numbers in mind as you decide what you want the millage rate to be. Okay. Let's be transparent. Let's write a gen that reports that makes sense and present facts and give you information rather than a sales pitch. Okay? And explain to you what it is we're trying to accomplish. And if it makes sense, let's do that. So let me go on from there. Dubai. Summary. Which is basically, now if you want to take notes, I got it down to the essence. I support a milligrate of .00034 for the park's bond milligrate. That will collect the revenues required to pay off the bond obligation and nothing more. Okay, and I just got that by taking what we collected last year, changing the investment to this year and saying what rate will give me the same number. So that should be 0.0034 and let's not bury in a slush fund of $300,000 in there. Okay, that the public is not expecting you to be doing. Two, I do not support using excess revenues on the park spawn to pay down debt at this time. When the parks have been built, we basically have a construction loan people here. We don't have a mortgage. I mean, we don't have Colley Creek done. I mean, we have one pocket part that's kind of nice. It's on Morton Road. We got some signage on State Bridge and we got some signage on Boles Road. We got a town center here. Who knows what that's gonna be? We've yet to see the money for that. Colley Creek, we're getting started, but nowhere near what we were promised in that park spot. This is not the time to be paying off that park spot. The future residents who are going to enjoy those parks should be paying off those bombs. Okay, not us. Okay, so moving on to the general fund. I support the rollback milligrate of .003756 for the general property tax. This will provide the city with a 3.1% increase in the property tax, commensurate with the growth of the city, the actual physical growth, not assessments, but of new homes and all of that kind of stuff which should pay for new facilities and all those kinds of things. Okay, and that will help improve the city's growth. Okay, I believe that an increase of 9.4% is excessive and that would be the consequence of the point holding a constant at 0.3986. Okay. Furthermore, I agree that setting the millage is not a reconciliation step against last year's budget. We do not have balanced budgets, like I mentioned before. We have in-out and search tank. Okay. And what the millage rate really does is the servant, you're unallocated reserves. So you need to look at your unallocated reserves where they are, where they're going, where do you want them to be? Okay. In the past, I've figured strongly that we have underfunded maintenance for this city. Maintenance of cruise, okay? If you just look at your depreciation, which is a pretty good measure of your maintenance, you should have a maintenance accrual equal to your depreciation. Think about that. Now, what have we been doing? We haven't been doing that. We've been eating off seed corn because we're new city and we've got new facilities and we don't need the main tank and we've done it, bunny aside, instead we keep building new stuff. Okay. And I want to compliment on whoever proposed the hey, let's start accruing the $5,000 for the $50,000 we're going to spend. We need to be doing that on every capital project. How much money are we going to put in a cruise for every capital project that you fund this year? You need to be doing that now, not five years from now, six years from now, et cetera. So you really need to look seriously because you say in your reports that I read it in the CAFRA report, we believe in maintaining the city first before we add more. Okay? So where's the study that says, are we setting aside enough money and accruals for maintenance? Is it equal to the amount that the thing is depreciated? I don't think so. And then finally, since the exception of the city, we were told we can run this city on the property tax fence and instead do told us that What they we do we pass the franchise tax to supplement our property tax We pass the park spawn which is now paying for parks We pass the teesblast which is now paying for roads and now we have stormwater tax which is playing for a stormwater so for roads and now we have stormwater attacks which is playing for a stormwater. So all of these additional sources of funding to pay for improvements should be offering some sort of relief for us against property attacks. I mean by stormwater bills it's made to re-roll us in the middle of $100 a year. Okay, not going to be going to bribe about 100 bucks a year, but you know, that's more than what I pay for the park's bond. That is 20% of what I pay in property tax. It's a big chunk of money. Okay. And so that's a lot to think about. I'm not telling you what number to put in there, but I think you really need to look at the facts of what you're doing and manage the city wisely, not get carried away with. Well, let's just collect money. We can spend money to fix every problem under the sun. I'm sure. You know, yeah, it's not a big deal, our property tax. When we add it all up, we can all pay more. And but we shouldn't have that attitude as a city, okay? We should be wise stewards of money. Not every problem is fixed with money. And sometimes you just need to spend money wisely and not profitably. Okay? And I hope that's what you'll do as you decide what the city should do in this budget for the coming year in terms of funding activities that I pay back, and are worth the money that we're spending for them, either for our property tax or anything else. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Reiner, for your comment. Anyone else would like to come up? I think I'm Samir Vakare and living in the East Ham and community right here and most of the points I think you covered already. So I mean, all I want to say is like, looks like two third of the revenue, whatever that tax digest is, will be coming from the reassessed value or existing homeowners, right? So if you take an example of my community, we are about 110 houses in last one year when people are seeing their house prices really skyrocketing. So maybe about four or five houses were on sale, right, out of 105. So the remaining 100 are still the same homeowners. We have been there for like about five, six years now. Right? Like if you take my example, I bought a house somewhere like around 500 K. Today it may be around 800, right? So my point is that if you're basing the pricing or the property tax increase based on the value of the house today, right? So my income has not gone up in last three years. It hasn't like close to doubled, right? Okay, it's't closed to double. Okay, it's good that the house prices are going up and where those five houses were resold, they were all gone close to a million dollar. So the new homeowners, they may be affording to buy a million dollar house and they may be like if I'm paying say $7,000 in taxes, they may be like if I'm paying say $7,000 in taxes, they may be able to afford pay like $11,000, they may be earning a lot more than I do. So my point is like I don't want the taxes to go up just based on the unrealized game. If I sell my house, I'm going to get 800, right? Great. I'll make some profit. But there are some other restrictions like my kids are in the good school. I don't want to move out. So I want to stay here for another two years. So you know what I mean to say? My income has not gone up that. So if that becomes the basis for increasing the property tax or the mileage rate, it will just not be affordable for me to continue paying higher and higher taxes every day. And especially this year when we have this 40-year high, record high inflation, for June, it was 9.1% inflation. So we are already spending a lot more than on day-to-day stuff. So my point is or request is that when you decide on that mileage rate, think about the inflation, like people are already spending a lot more. And if that property tax also increases at the same time, it's like you're putting extra burden. So my point is, if there are any projects, or like what you said, yes, maintenance or existing stuff, we'll definitely take high priority. But if there is anything that is nice to have category or anything strategic which again, delay for like a year or two, and that gives some relief to the residents in terms of the lower increase in the problem that that would be good. And so I just rate that article. I mean, so I would propose to that you guys will go for that rollback rate of 3.7, for various six meals, just considering the high incision rate that you have in this current year. Thank you. Thank you, Samir. Would anyone else like to make a comment? Anybody else before I close the public hearing? Saying none, I'll close the public hearing. Council of the floor is open for your questions. If I have a question for Director Campbell. I have a question for Director Campbell. Is it related to the, so Mr. Reineke spoke, what I would consider the equivalent Is it related to the, so Mr. Reinecke spoke, what I would consider the equivalent of a part-spon rollback rate. But when I was about, I had 39 as too low to cover what we were budgeted for. So I had a hair under 2 million using the 96% collections and then 97% within the fiscal year. So I had a short approximately $140,000. Unless you weren't using those same, the 96 and 97%. We're using the same 96, 97%. We approach it a little bit differently, though, as far as looking at the annual debt service. We do round it, and we round it for purposes of to make sure that we have enough cash on hand to make the debt service payment. And I think it's interesting, and it's important to note that the funds that are coming in from the assessment of the Millage Rate for the Parks Bond go into a special dedicated fund for Parks Bond repayment only. That does not get co-mingled and it can't be used to service other things I think is kind of what I heard in some of the earlier comments. So the amount, if there is an additional amount that's above and beyond the required amount to service the debt for this year, it remains in that fund and it can only be used to service the debt in the future. Okay. So that would just maybe we'll link up offline, but I had it short so that debt service was 2.1 million approximately. And then I had the point zero, zero, zero, zero three nine coming in at 1.955. So we would have to utilize unless I'm wrong here that I mean we have what three hundred thousand dollars in the in the bond fund right now. We can I don't have that I'm sorry I don't have that sheet in front of me I can certainly run those numbers for you and we can confirm that following the meeting. Okay. Great. Anybody else have a question? I, well, it's not a question, but Director Campbell, could you maybe just speak on the 96% and 97% because sometimes when you just calculate the military by the tax digest, you think it's much higher than what we're actually going to get in. Correct. And what you're referring to is there's certain percentage that is allowed for the link with the or the lagging of payments that will come in. And then there is the second portionment for possible appeals that will happen on an assessed rate. So those are two factors that run behind the scenes. Once you have the gross amount based on the tax digest according with the proposed millage rate. And then we do adjustments for delinquency as well as then potential appeals. Anything else? Claire? I'm okay right now. Thank you. All right. With that, I believe that we are concluding the public hearing. Thank you, Ronnie. Thank you. Council, we are adjourned until 7 o'clock, and we will do our council meeting.