Split Habersham budget vote locks in $84.6 million plan, while details remain unclear

Habersham County commissioners adopted Resolution 2024-07-002, the county’s FY 2025 budget, in a 3-2 vote July 22, 2024. The resolution set a $39,794,187 General Fund and $84,569,306 across all county funds, and included a 4% cost-of-living adjustment for employees to appear in the first September 2024 payroll, retroactive to July 1.

The decision governs the money Habersham County has available for everyday services and the workers, equipment, buildings and technology that support them. Commissioners sought to hold onto a rollback to an 11.771 millage rate while weighing requests involving fire and emergency services, facilities, information technology and animal care. But the published minutes excerpts do not include a complete itemized spending schedule, making it difficult to determine how the adopted framework settled those competing priorities.

The vote followed a July 22 work session in which commissioners considered a budget built around a $39,171,485 General Fund, pension-plan credits and additional cuts intended to retain requested staffing while keeping the proposed millage rollback. At that stage, they had not resolved how a proposed 4% employee increase would be divided between merit pay and a cost-of-living adjustment. Later, at the called meeting, the commission considered a $44.6 million General Fund request after $5.4 million in cuts; that proposal retained $1.69 million in capital requests and 14 positions before the final resolution was approved.

Supporters of the spending framework focused on balancing the tax-rate rollback with employee compensation and service needs, including the staffing and capital requests under discussion. The record reflects that commissioners debated whether the 4% increase should be merit-based, a cost-of-living adjustment or some combination before the adoption language identified it as a COLA. During public comment, resident Paula Hanington objected to the proposed budget’s growth, saying the proposed $84.5 million 2025 total was $27.5 million above the $57 million total budget she cited for 2021 and calling the increase unsustainable; her comment was a criticism, not a finding by the commission.

What is established is that the commission adopted the FY 2025 resolution and the stated General Fund and all-funds totals, along with the 4% COLA and its scheduled payroll treatment. What is not established in the minutes excerpts is whether every proposed position and capital request survived unchanged, what line items ultimately received funding, or whether later amendments altered the plan. The quoted adoption passage is truncated before the full voting details, although the official minutes identify the action as a 3-2 vote.

The next public test of the budget will be the complete adopted resolution and any later budget amendments, expenditure reports and audited financial statements. Those records could show which staffing and capital requests received final approval, how the county structured employee pay, whether spending changed during the fiscal year and what was ultimately spent. Until then, the county’s annual budget framework is in place, but its detailed follow-through remains undecided in the public account.