Walker County to vote May 19 on SPLOST
Walker County voters will decide May 19 whether to continue the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or SPLOST, to fund capital outlay projects for another six years.
Commissioner Shannon Whitfield on Thursday, Feb. 13, signed an intergovernmental agreement between the county and the cities of Rossville, Fort Oglethorpe, Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain and LaFayette that outlines the use and distribution of revenues generated from the tax.
“This is critical for our county to move forward,” he said.
Using sales tax dollars to help finance capital outlay projects eases the tax burden on property owners, he said.
Officials anticipate the 1% tax will generate $44 million over its six-year lifespan, according to the intergovernmental agreement. From each payment collected, 20% would be divided equally between the county, LaFayette, Chickamauga, Rossville and Lookout Mountain.
Of the remaining 80%, the county would receive
75%, LaFayette 11%, Rossville 6.34%, Chickamauga 4.79%, Lookout Mountain 2.48% and Fort Oglethorpe 0.39%.
The sole commissioner explained that current SPLOST expires Sept. 30, and he needed to authorize the referendum now to put it on the May 19 ballot to ensure the new SPLOST, if approved, would go into effect Oct. 1; otherwise, delaying the authorization would result in the referendum going on the Nov. 3 ballot and would create a lapse in tax collections until they could resume in April 2021.
Whitfield praised the spirit of cooperation he saw among city leaders. In the past, deciding how much each government received caused a lot of hurt feelings and necessitated remediation to
determine how to divvy up the dollars. This time when representatives of the six governments sat down to negotiate the distribution of funds, they worked it out within 35 minutes, he said.
The commissioner did not recall a time when Walker County voters failed to pass the SPLOST.
Voters in neighboring Whitfield County last year rejected a proposed 1%, sixyear, SPLOST that would have generated $100 million for the county, Dalton, Tunnel Hill, Varnell and Cohutta.
As of 2019, only three counties in the state did not have a SPLOST: Towns; Fulton, which has a MARTA tax and TSPLOST (Transportation SPLOST); and Muscogee, which has a TSPLOST.