DeKalb resists tax hike but budget called a "mess"

By Megan Matteucci

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The DeKalb County budget committee voted Thursday to not raise property taxes, but was unable to finalize any cuts to meet a looming $100-million deficit.

County commissioners also on Thursday rejected a revised budget from CEO Burrell Ellis that called for a .92 mill property tax increase in the 2010 budget. Ellis previously called for a 1.86 mill increase.

Despite the new proposal, commissioners were disappointed that Ellis did not supply firm budget numbers. The commission is scheduled to vote on a final budget on Tuesday.

“This is probably the biggest mess I’ve seen in the 18 years I’ve served,” Commissioner Elaine Boyer said.

Shelia Edwards, a spokeswoman for the CEO, could not say when the numbers would be finalized, only that Ellis is still working on them.

Commissioners called another emergency budget meeting for Friday with the hope they will be furnished more detailed financial figures.

While the new budget proposal has deep cuts, it still does not include enough reductions to meet the newly discovered 6.7 percent decrease in property values. Those cuts will not be made until June when the tax digest is finalized, Commissioner Jeff Rader said.

The CEO’s revised budget, which included the tax increase, called for no staff reductions in the courts, public defender’s and solicitor-general’s offices.

Positions in those departments that had been eliminated in an early proposal were restored to the budget after complaints that the such cuts would violate residents’ constitutional rights.

Despite adding the court jobs back into the budget, the CEO’s new proposal called for cuts in the district attorney’s and sheriff’s budget.

“I learned last evening I took a $1.5-million hit,” Sheriff Thomas Brown told commissioners. “I’m quite frankly a little disappointed in the lack of transparency here. I’m learning my information from the media.”

Commissioners have insisted they will not cut public safety, including rescinding furlough days for police and firefighters.

Brown said he was disappointed that his office was not included in that group.

“Let’s understand that public safety is much more than who’s writing a ticket on Memorial Drive,” Brown said.

The current budget proposal calls for all employees, including police officers and firefighters, to go unpaid on holidays and no longer be eligible for take-home county vehicles.

The new proposal calls for cutting 348 of the 415 vehicles that county employees may currently take home. Of those 415 cars, 298 are assigned to the police department, Edwards said.

For police, the take-home car is a privilege given to homicide detectives, SWAT officers, bomb squad members, public information officers, command staff members and other officers placed on-call.

Those take-home cars are necessary to keep response times low, said Master Police Officer Jeff Wiggs, president of the DeKalb Fraternal Order of Police. The take-home cars allow officers to use lights and sirens to get to crime scenes quicker, he said.

“For officers that are expected to respond to scenes in a timely manner such as Special Ops and Criminal Investigations, this would effect us and the county in a negative way if they took away or changed the take-home car policy already in place,” he said.

Atlanta, Cobb and Gwinnett allow their command staff and essential on-call personnel, including SWAT and the bomb squad, to take home police vehicles.