It came down to one word.
After more than an hour of debate in a meeting last Friday, one word ultimately determined the Putnam County Commission's decision to opt into State House Bill 581 as it stands.
Tabled by District 3 Commissioner Steve Hersey, the final motion was “… to authorize staff to schedule three public hearings on the intent of the Putnam County Commission to opt out of the statewide adjusted base year ad valorem homestead exemption and to advertise the intent as prescribed in House Bill 581.”
With only one month remaining before the state's March 1 deadline for an irreversible automatic opt-in, there was limited time to issue three official notices for public meetings. These meetings aimed to discuss further HB 581 and its impact on local homestead exemptions.
Hersey and new District 2 Commissioner Richard Garrett each voted “Yay” on the measure, while District 1’s Tom McElhenney (attending the meeting by phone after undergoing surgery on Thursday) and Jeff Wooten of District 4 each registered “Nay.”
“Okay, we have two for, two against. And the motion leads me, I have to vote, and I will vote if it will take it,” Sharp said. “So, the motion will fail. The chairman votes ‘Nay.’”
“And the failure of this motion, therefore, means that we will opt-in,” Hersey immediately commented. “We have no other choice. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I’m sure the public will thank you as well.”
When asked almost immediately after the vote why he sided with no further discussion of the HB 581 measure, Sharp told The Eatonton Messenger, “The way the motion read, it didn’t read ‘Let’s have public meetings.’ It said we’re going to exempt ourselves from this … it focused on exemptions …
“And I don’t have a problem telling the voters what’s happening. I love it. The more we can, the better we are. But this said simply, ‘We’re going to exempt,’ and I couldn’t say yes to that.”
While Sharp referenced “exempt,” he pointed to the word “intent” on the printout of the motion he’d read as being problematic.
“I felt like the right thing was not to be exempt. If he (Hersey) had said, ‘We want to have these public meetings without an exemption just to talk about it,’ I’d have been for that.”
To clarify, The Messenger asked Sharp if a different word, such as “potential” or “possibility,” had been written in the motion and if he could have supported more discussion then.
“Yes, of course,” he answered. “But that’s not what it said.”
The meeting also included presentations by Putnam County Tax Commissioner Terrell Abernathy and Chief Appraiser Chuck Anglin.
“If something changes on the state level and you have opted out, you can always match whatever the state is doing. You (the Putnam County Commission) beat it 30 years ago,” Abernathy pointed out long before the final vote was taken. “So, you can do whatever you’d like unless you limit yourself and throttle yourself with this by staying opted in, which isn’t going to hurt you unless there is some change at the state level.”
Meanwhile, Anglin explained that opting into HB 581 would require his office to keep two complete accounting books for Putnam County’s approximately 5,600 homesteaded properties out of 20,000.
He said one would use a statewide “floating homestead” exemption based on a rate of inflation determined by the state Department of Revenue.
At the same time, the other would reflect established Putnam County accounting practices since the house bill says the more advantageous of the two will apply to each homestead property.
When asked how much that might cost the county, Anglin hesitated before estimating at least $20,000 annually for part-time assistance but added he might have to hire another full-time accountant.