Taylor says homeonwers will benefit from increased tax base
Bartow County Commissioner Steve Taylor doesn’t see any downsides to approving things like warehouses and data centers. He said the best option with growth isn’t to stop it but to manage it and he thinks he’s managed it well.
“The traffic issues is real and we need to address those,” the commissioner said, adding that several projects are coming or being constructed now that will address traffic issues including the Rome-Cartersville connector that links Highway 411 directly with I-75 and work on Old Alabama Road.
He said the Old Alabama Road project should be completed within a year. He also wants an overpass type of road at Euharlee Road to resolve traffic problems caused by regular trains.
Taylor thinks his zoning decisions will help pay for many of these infrastructure projects.
While many residents have criticized the commissioner for regular approvals of warehouses, Taylor defends his decisions. He said it isn’t his duty to make sure empty warehouses are leased and filled.
“Those (property owners) are still paying property taxes,” Taylor said. “They pay the full load of tax. Once they fill up, the next complaint will be traffic and so forth. That’s not up to the local government to make sure they are filled up. That’s the market that does that.”
He said data centers are a good thing because they don’t add people, traffic, noise, or pollution to the county. However, they do add money. The data center at the Gaines family farm is a $19 billion investment over 10 years, he said.
“Just think if you take the Switch data center and the Project Bunkhouse, which is the one in Taylorsville, those two alone are from what we understand could be between $40 and $50 billion in investment,” he said.
Taylor said the Bartow County tax digest is around $25 billion dollars.
“You can conceivably take the homestead exemption for residential way up, maybe even as far as the county goes, maybe even up to 100 percent,” Taylor said, adding that would happen over 10 years.
He said homeowners and individual citizens should see a return on the investment in their property taxes and Taylor expects some of that to happen soon. He added that Bartow County government didn’t opt out of a new Georgia law that limits increasing taxes only by the rate of inflation.
That means citizens won’t see a tax increase of more than 3 percent from year to year even if their assessed values rise. He said the millage rate won’t reduce but the home property exemption will rise. That way, industrial properties will still pay full taxes to run the county, but the burden would be lessened on home property owners.
Taylor pointed out that approving plans to build things doesn’t mean they will be built. He said plans sometimes fall through. Development is complicated and people can run out of money, can’t find construction companies, or change plans.
Melody Dareing is a freelance writer for publications in the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Germany. She is a former news director at Adelphia Channel 4 and WBHF Radio.