EARLY – During Tuesday night’s meeting, the Early City Council unanimously approved a 20 cent increase to the proposed 2024-25 fiscal year property tax rate over the current 2023-24 tax rate, a measure necessitated primarily, according to Early City Administrator Tony Aaron, by the City’s need to purchase new fire trucks.

The City of Early’s tax rate has been on a steady decline since the 2016-17 fiscal year when it stood at 56 cents. The proposed tax rate for 2024-25 will be 0.59924 per $100 valuation compared to the current tax rate of 0.3993.

Aaron explained the need for the change.

“Within the rationale of the rate change is the need to purchase two new main fire trucks, a fire engine and then a ladder truck,” Aaron said. “With the growth of multi-story buildings, the Atwoods project at 63,000 square foot, the engine is about $1 million and the ladder truck usually runs about $2 million. Creating a reserve fund allows the Council to have the funding ability to start addressing those major purchases that will happen, at least the decisions, within the next 12-36 months. Build time on those fire trucks, for an engine is about 18-24 months and for a ladder truck takes anywhere from 24-36 months. Even if we think we need one in three years, we have to start talking about buying one right now. That’s the biggest impact on the tax rate.”

Aaron further explained that property taxes pay the bulk of the expenses for the police department and fire department.

“That rate is actually a decrease in revenue of about 15 percent,” Aaron said. “Our no new revenue rate is 71 cents, our voter approval rate is 62 cents, and then the de minimis rate is 76 cents, so we’re proposing adopting something lower than that. It actually generates about $2.1 million and our police and fire budgets are at $2.4 million, the rest of that is made up out of sales tax.”

The City also “lost about 43 percent of our total taxable value,” Aaron added, “due to a lawsuit that was won,” against the Appraisal District.

“When the value reduces the rate has to go up in order to make it balance out and generate the same property tax revenue,” Aaron said. “Early’s got a lot of things going on, a lot of big projects we’ve been doing such as the Town Center and the potential that will come from that, and this is all part of that growing aspect of our community getting bigger and our needs growing with that. The Council’s done a really good job of managing the funds of the City and keeping those as low as they possibly can, while continuing to provide the services that are needed.”

Council member Leland Acker registered concerns before logging a vote in favor.

“I hate this, I hate this tax rate, and I want to vote no on it but I feel like that would be irresponsible from a financial standpoint, so I’m probably going to wind up voting for it,” Acker said. “But I think it’s imperative we understand and we remember that we’re actually building a town here and rebuilding the older parts of the town. What we’ve invested in has been to the best benefit of our citizens. Most of our money has been going into public works projects and improving the community as a whole. The only thing that I look at over our projects the last few years that could be considered superfluous is the Town Center Park, but it’s wildly popular and without the Town Center Park you don’t have the Town Center retail development. That retail development, we’ll recoup a lot of that in short order with the sale of the properties and the sales tax revenue as a result.”

The final vote will on the tax rate and 2024-25 fiscal year budget will take place Tuesday, Aug. 20.

Also Tuesday, the City Council approved entering into an agreement for IT services with VC3, a remote IT company for $56,586 for a year. There is also an initial setup cost of approximately $4,900. VC3 will oversee all computers, servers and storage for the City of Early.

In the City Administrator’s report, Aaron stated construction of the Boardwalk at the Town Center is on track to begin in September, the Crescent Street sewer project is about to wrap up, and the paving of Autumn Drive could be completed by the end of next week.