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because this is an area that there's not a lot of people who really fully understand what's available to them I think Michael presented the law it's extremely well there's some huge inequities out there that most of us just aren't paying attention to and there's a wonderful resources and that's what I'm gonna try to do the next 30 minutes you submit the trenches ideas of how you can do better in your negotiation and Come Away with some resources that can make your city better let me qualify before I get started by talking about what I hope we'll do the next 30 minutes is tell you how to prepare for the battle so you don't have a rule um this this is not designed to create enemies between us and our County but it could but the more prepared you are the less likely that is to happen okay so we want to you know we talk about it's not fun but it can be I love negotiations I love to get in there particularly if I have all the right answers when you're playing cards and you know you've got the Deuces and the one-eye Jackson it's more fun to play poster when you're held in all the cards so I'm going to give you some ideas and ways you can hold some cards when you've done negotiations that makes this quite not so painful a couple of tips also too that we used in ranking we're gonna I'll show you the success we had through our negotiations for our three cities in our area um we began communicating with our commissioners because when I came to the table to work with the city of Rincon um there was not very good relationship between our Canada City and they were at each other and we weren't communicating it was like everything was a legal battle and a suit so the first thing I did is I tried to help them with their finances because they were a little behind on their audits and so forth as you put together a 10-year plan and we talked about where we want to be where's the what do you want your um city limits to be how far do you want to Annex you know where do you want to run your water and sewer we looked at a much more took the comprehensive plan we began with that and begin to build it so we wanted to know where we were going to go because if you go into this business negotiating Service delivery just to get more money you're going to create enemies but if you can go to your Commissioners like we did and begin to talk to them took them out to eat asked the council give me a little budget I need to talk to these guys and gals and sit down with them I've been in show them what we need in Recreation what we need in roads what we need in drainage is a huge problem is we're growing and we bring more boxes in and more asphalt so I began to show them my need before we begin to do the battling over the service delivery but I already knew the numbers or what I want to do I just had to convince them with the needs that make sense and I think when you do that you gotta remember we're family we live in the same county you're the same churches go to the same Rotary Club and they got to sit across from these Commissioners and I don't want to say there's that old Westby took us for a ride you know so part of this is communication communication communication so they're going to give you some things I think it'll help you uh be sure to remember to communicate and you can can have fun and also as Michael said earlier this is not just for Service delivery we use this in our laws and I put together our lost packet we were ready to go to court and I mean it's a long introduction I don't even say this too you got to be ready to do that to do War or don't go to battle don't prepare for battle if you don't have the I won't be too strong if you don't have the stomach for it don't get into it you know uh people will negotiate more if you negotiate from strength professionally and respectfully communicating but they got to know they used to go to court that's where we'll go and there were times when we made that point but if you look at what I'm going to show you now what Mike was showing you and probably what's coming afterwards and you're ready you'll find that you'll have a better position with your counties you as you move into this so we're going to focus on there's a lot about the uh about the law and there's a lot about boundaries but I'm going to focus on tax equity and how you can put some Trump cards okay in your negotiation of power when you go to work with them and I'm gonna go to ABC's of what what I believe is important first of all you need to understand the law the two things I'm going to do a little repetition before I get in some techniques and strategies um the a part to be part of house group 49 is so important when you look at it says first at May the cost of any service which the county provides primarily for the benefit of the unincorporated area of the county shall be borne by the uh unincorporated area residents individuals property owners who receive that service okay that's the law if you can show and I'm gonna show you how to do that if you can show that certain people are getting the service the primary benefit you've satisfied half of the requirement if it has to go to a legal route and you prepare to get argument you're on good ground and they'll know if you get a good argument you know if you can prove that we're going to talk about how to do that and this is something you gotta remember Kenny doesn't know this I can't remind him you know if we win this argument there's only four revenues remember Michael said that earlier there's only four revenues you can use to fund these roads these Recreation the streams as far or whatever there's only four revenues that you can use for your uh zoning your senior citizens or whatever you got that's the things that we had as duplicated Services type Services only for revenues insurance premium tax type of tax for a special district user fees assessments that's it they can't use lost they can't use Pilots can't use franchise Cablevision and here's a lot that's a lot of money out they couldn't use wouldn't that change their budget a little bit so we got you got to do a good job on the front end of defining these services and so it's going to require um that you identify the services provided by your county and your city and you classify them you sort of take some research and some study to do that you can find this information from their financial audits from their budgets and also the DCA reports everybody familiar with the DCA filings that you have shows the detail service calls the funding of each service provides all that you put all this together and we actually put it into a document and just show you a picture real quickly of a document all right it's just one page of it well I listed every service and went on for a couple three pages that they had and we did a detailed analysis to find out is this service a duplicated service is it a county-wide service or is it a hybrid service we're going to talk about hybrid Services a little bit those are those Services where the primary benefit is for the unincorporated area and they don't believe it we got to convince them of it um so you want to evaluate classifying by the the areas I just gave you that's going to take some analysis and this is what we used and some other things as well but we used three tests basically to come up with you won't find this in law but you need a basis for primary use we use location population and use of service and I'll give you some specific examples of how we apply that to our working with the county non-negotiations roads for example and every every County every city is going to be different I understand that you've got to look at your particular situation spend a lot of time analyzing this um in our County the county spends absolutely no dollars on the roads inside the city so we said location where are the roads that you spend your money on yeah put it simple if it gets poor judge right in the incorporate area Okay primary benefits unincorporated how about the population where's the greater population in our candidates in the county it's a population eight percent of population is using those roads only 20 of us are using it but next thing was really huge use of service we can access every single recreation facility they have every government building they have and only two elementary schools can be not accessed by a Georgia Highway we don't even need the county roads to access all the services they provide does that make sense so use of service we don't really need it that's a strong argument and so with roads we said you're the primary user and they begin to get a little concerned that we might get convinced the judge of this okay because we had a good argument why you're the primary user take Recreation give you another example location in our particular County yours may be different they haven't spent any money within our city limits in the last 20 years on any recreational parks a little bit different from the Sun situation so once again everybody's different no gymnasiums no ball fields no football fields no parks in 20 years but yet we the city are paying the same tax as the unincorporated area if you remember what Michael said a while ago there's 87 cities counties in this uh 159 that are paying the same Avalon tax in the city or outside the city that tells me is a lot of inequity probably some city right here in this room you just need to build a financing to win the argument so a population is the same argument but use of service and I'll give you one little secret can't give you almost figures one more secret how you use the use of service once again we could access all their services Recreation by by US state roads but they don't have a transportation system you gotta look at all these services and all the supplemental powers and what they do and so we said you don't have any Recreation facilities in absence RC so how are the underprivileged and the disabled going to use your services in our city and we belonged here uh how are they going to get to your services you're not providing you sure I'm saying that's a big problem for them they're not providing their services County Wide because a lot of people can't even use it does that make sense you got to think outside the box and think how can I define so that if it goes to a court not only do my commission receipt I sit down with them primary use is Young corporate area but I got a good argument for it too so you want to be able to support it you've got the drainage you get through all the services you list is that making sense and so you got to do a good job of defining these services and why the county is getting the primary benefit because you're looking for that inequity that's taking place so I'll just give you a couple examples of that next thing you want to do is you're going to study the financial audits this is what we did and you're going to run the numbers now this is approach we take and I take this approach because it puts a picture your picture's worth a thousand words in it if you can see the picture of the inequity it's one thing to talk about it people not get some brief you can put it in Quantified numbers and that even becomes more frightful for our County Commissioners but also beneficials they begin to see how the inequity is I can say listen beer this this is really inequitable here's the dollars it's costing us what's going on where you're going to uh need to uh what you need to be provided from the County's Financial audits but you will also need their expense details which the most accurate expense detail I've found is the auditor's trial balance I did audits for years and what does everybody know what Auditor's trial balance is it takes the trial balance from the city or the county and if they make adjustments or transfers or reclasses it puts them into the correct balance that's going to be on the audit you can actually take the audit number off the department you can type right into the trial balance that's real helpful because particularly when I find things I'm going to show you that I found and I need to reclass them I can show them how I did that okay so it sounds like a lot of work and it is but you need to run the numbers so you can quantify the tax inequity that's taking place so the financial statements below the numbers uh you need to know the funding sources so when I when I received the audience and I went back about five years to do my analysis and then I expanded when I found some things that I found and I'll show what I found one thing I'm looking for is the funding sources for all those services that I identified okay I got my start here's my services County Wide hybrids duplicated now I'm gonna come up with the uh cost as well I'll share the minute but I'm going to put the funding sources here for you now here's some funny sources a lot of people don't think about when I was beginning to examine our County's audits in our attorney Kingdom and say can you look over the audience and see how they comply on the service delivery were they using the fund the special service strategy Services I said sure I'll look at it here's what I found our County was making loans to the special service districts one Service District had a 12 million dollar loan that's non-compliance with Service delivery agreement that's really a funding you understand what I'm saying here's this special service that they're providing to the unincorporated area they can't afford to provide it but the general fund has plenty of money why because they're taxing all of us they said hey let's just loan the money to the special service fund 12 million dollars well our attorney got real excited when I showed him about that one because that's a big Ace in the Hole you go to negotiate because next thing I noticed was looking at what their revenues mentioned were they couldn't pay that back for the next 20 years maybe not 30 years well being a CPA in my background an auditor I need the general secretary principle says you can't pay it back what have you got to do with that in a fun loan anybody know huh So speaking of making the transfer you gotta make an equity transfer well that's automatically a violation of Service delivery because you just funded with tax dollars from the unincorporated in the uh Incorporated I'm sorry but the unincorporated so they couldn't do that so we would say I already knew this if I built the relationships but I knew that they owed us and our percentage of that uh assessed digest that Michael was talking about ours was 15 take 15 of 12 million dollars that's a huge number and I began to feel really good about these negative chases but I need to find something so look more than just the the local funding look at what they've been doing in the past history next thing watch out for uh transfers from Service delivery to special service districts okay because transfers get buried after after one year if you put in a transfer where does it go goes into fund balance you'll never see it again that's why I went back several years so I could trade track the transfer so not only did I get this 12 million that was on the books I picked up another few uh million that were in transfers that were just along the way they got buried and I brought them back up and said all right this is what we would this is what you've taken in tax dollars and you've put over here to a special service makes sense so you're going to look at the funding sources outside of just those enumerated and non-enumerated sources um so what are the funding sources used by the county for uh service did you want to examine that there's the four numerated sources you want to track those insurance payment taxes when you want to track you want to see how they're using those enumerator so what they're going to use us for okay not a name ready you want to track those what's a non-enumerated source it's anyone that's not the enumerator okay and so you want to track those and see how they're using them because all the non-numerated sources have to be used for county-wide services and we found and we did they were using some of them for special service that's another AC that's another hole something I got in my pocket you got to move that back out you cannot use that any longer you know like Michael said you can negotiate other sources and you can allow things to happen and that's what we did we didn't go in there to be ugly and just try to win this big battle and get a bunch of money we had a plan we needed resources we wanted to solve inequities we were short of the inequities and we did compromise and allowed them to use some resources and special service areas that they couldn't have done without a compromise we compromised because it goes to the judge he may not see our side audit right so it's always good to not go to the but you gotta be ready to go and so that's what you're trying to work toward um another thing we looked at was what are the general fund reserves accumulated and what was the source so I did an analysis of that to find out they had under finally got 36 million dollars in reserves to the Special Service District that still is a pretty good balance of reserves and so we didn't get anything out as reserves because they hadn't used it yet we couldn't justify that but they knew we were watching it from that point on does that make sense so it helped all the county taxpayers so city of really beneficial and say all right let's make sure we spend this money right let's get some decreased taxes in the future if we need to but you want to I think you want to look at those reserves then how about the interest lost on general fund transfers and Loans most people even thought about that oh but I'm a numbers guy and if you got 12 million dollars I know there's interest on that 12 million dollars and that's another million too so I'll put that number in there too so I said this is what you cost us for the last 10 years going back 10 years after I sold seven or five years makes sense so these are numbers you want to look at in addition to taking the all the non-numerated revenues and tracing and seeing what they do and we did a little analysis once again you can't see this but it's a page like this where I took all the non-human revenues and schedule them out and apply them to all the services in the court is with the law and the whole purpose of that is to come up with the amount of property tax they use for each service that's important you'll see why that is in just a minute so uh see we're still saying the financial numbers you've got to look at the cost research what is including the cost of service uh special delivery strategy services and general fund services you really need to do a detailed analysis of what's in there and Michael's are talking about some they were obviously taking their administrative costs and paying with county-wide monies and we made them distribute that to all the special service districts which of course lowered the amount of property taxes they could say they would actually spending on countywide Services which made more reserves which made more money we could bargain for that makes sense you gotta make and distribute all these administrative Services who pays the payroll for the water and Sue fund probably the financial administration of the countywide administrative service that makes sense they pay all the bills accounts payables or things put that out engineering many times the engineering will be very particularly understand Service delivery and bear that Engineering Supply administrative costs okay what that engineering was designing drainage in the county or designing Water and Sewer lines and so forth but they because it wasn't assigned to a project they put it in journal engineering under General administrative and it could be hundreds of thousands of dollars now in our community remember our community 15 is what our tax base is of the whole County Wide and sound like a lot if you got a hundred thousand dollars of engineering fees that should be assigned to a Special Service District that's fifteen thousand dollars that belongs to us what could you do with fifteen thousand dollars I could do a lot it makes sense so you want to do the detailed analysis and that's why the detailed trial balance helps you out you can go in there and start from there and then if you want to request open records from information find out what's in those accounts and and look at them and they will not trying they're not trying to cheat it I'm not trying to say that but you know we tend to spend things don't we so we'll try to justify to put these calls somewhere we can detect it I think I heard Michael somebody say they already put stuff in the sheriff's department if you're not careful because they know you can't touch it over there right now we need to rise up with GMA and try to get something changed on the chair that's a very big inequity and I'm not sure Michael you might address this later you can't dress it and Service delivery but we we tried to address it we you know going to court we addressed it during uh lost I mean every elected official and the sheriff is officials yeah they can sit down and discuss yeah yeah we made an issue because you're not we can't really make it an issue as far as funding so much for this but it could do it for law so I actually ran the numbers on it for for lost and to come back to them you can also negotiate supplies make people don't know that uh population just to fall back there may be there's a lot of things you can do to resolve inequities and just need to be aware there's some place to do that but you got to run the numbers in my opinion if you want to do a good job and really be able to know that when you get support and judge will see it and you can win this argument and convince your Commissioners that there's inequity um so as general service costs uh admin Financial all that needs to be divided out engineering we talked about that maintenance uh we saw where they would take all the maintenance of all the buildings and they threw them into a one administrative fund to the janitorial of this for all the buildings even the Warren sewer the wastewater treatment facilities it was all in a fairly wide funds that makes sense you gotta break these things out so just if you want to get down to the weeds there's some good resources there uh to do that no okay I'm not sure if I skip a slab here make sure foreign Factor once you once you come up with the numbers and and what we did we came up with what every every Department the property taxes that were used by the county for every single service they they perform okay once I I had that and I had that property tax they were using for roads Recreation drainage um senior citizens could we help you provide that as well jail different things there's some things in jail we resolved because we used to pay a lot of money for our using the jail now we negotiate a jail feed which helped us out we actually in the fire we have a negotiated contract we actually did 500 000 a year which is not going to be part of the revenues I'm going to show you came about during our service delivery we actually obtained a 500 000 contract from them for fire Services uh it was one of our weak areas we were going to lose that argument so we beefed off our fire department got a better ISO than they did it was more advantageous for them to invest in us then Surplus and close us out so we knew where we wanted to go and we did we did what we had to do to make it work and so we actually have resources from them that helps us out about the fire department but here's the whole point when you get down to it and you come up with what the property taxes they're using on these primary services where Fear Factor is and this is the Fear Factor I'm going to repeat it we said it several times a day there's only four enumerated revenues available for a special service special delivery from strategy Services only pull I have a good argument I can show the taxes you're taken out of my city for your unincorporated for the primary benefit and it's a really darn good argument and I've got a good picture of it you know then they have some fears only because what if they couldn't use in our city it's not a lot maybe it's more important but what if they cannot use their seven million dollars and lost any longer to help pay for those in Recreation and drainage so many other services that we saw or primarily for the benefit of the Incorporated area where if they had to not use their pilot which is about a minute and a half payment little taxes we had about nine million dollars they can no longer use maybe 10 if we won this battle see how it brings them to the table if you know what you're dealing with and you know the property taxes Okay so and here's the thing you know if it goes to the they know this oops I think yeah there we go these are set clearly in the Statue and the court cannot adjust it you understand that judge can't say well you know I think this is a good Revenue I think they should be able to use because the this particular tax is collected mainly from the unincorporated I think they could use it no they can't do that you can once he makes a decision that the primary benefit is for the incorporate area there's only four revenues they can use so that's the Fear Factor and that was the Fear Factor that our County had to be kept reminding them you know if we go to court and you lose this some of the things we did is we we let them use the pilot we let them use some penalties and interest from taxes so we we made some huge concessions but what we received was what we needed but more than we needed we might be a little stronger next time but we're trying to keep our family together in Effingham County and Rincon so you can have some have some compromises um we negotiate Financial possibilities and these are some you could have tax roll back uh to one or more municipalities that was the first thing we proposed to them is that it had been a middle drill back of four or five meals for us if they've taken the dollars that I could come up with and I'd agree at one point we finally come up with a number that this is what the inequity is and they agree to pay it to us and how you pay it to us we wanted it first in the rollbacks to help the citizens they didn't want to do a rollback you know why because why would probably would not want to do a rollback everybody went Annex wouldn't they they had a poor military so you want to end it they wanted they didn't want to roll back they said we'll pay it to you so they paid us a cash they paid us a cash payout for the next 10 years unless we renegotiate the service delivery and we we're fixing to go back and do some new negotiating and I think we'll do a little better even than what we've done um so they they chose a payment of cash in any kind to resolved in equity you can do that uh lump sum payments for violations we received our city alone 2.3 million dollars about violation of 12 million dollars we said all right you can't pay it back we'll let you keep it in Special Service District but you give us a share option so we negotiate 2.3 million we represent all the cities and they've got about 3.3 together but we got 2.3 of that that was huge for us the four new baseball fields and fixing to build a concession building and we widened the road it was crucial to our commercial district and so but I I already shown this is what we need we need a gymnasium now so there's a lot of things but that's what we did we got a lump sum payment um improved equity and monitoring and Service delivery everything we did we make sure the agreement I think you mentioned that earlier that was a good idea this calculation of how we calculate inequities we put it in our documents so you can't go back later on say well we didn't talk about that or we didn't say that no this is the services we agree with hybrids duplicated this is it okay if you had a new service we'll talk about it then does that make sense so we got a document so it makes monitoring a lot easier in the future we're going to go back over the old material um how to cut how to calculate a rollback let me just kind of show you some numbers almost flip through this other slides you can't see it anyway that's the carpet Express but you can't see it um this is a the amount of protection I got you know I took the producer this is gross this is what it works but I took the amount of uh cost to whatever user went against that road created all the not only probably all the noname rate we haven't used it you can do um but we agree they could use lost on that that's one of the things we could use on the others but we love them using all this and so we came up with this is how much property taxes were left over they had to have to fund the roads okay and since we've had a good argument that the primary use of those roads were in the uncorporated area you got 15 of that uh 292 578 for 10 years not just because that will get more because now we'll get less okay and then Recreation we did the same thing and so this is the final result of our negotiation and this is for all the cities not just us we represented all the cities in our area we were not an infected City we understood what effect the city is we want 9 000 and we missed it by like 60 people so we had to have another municipality so we could be 50 of the non-effective Cities if not they wouldn't sit down with us so they had to sit down with us because we have to get our signature so that helped make medicine affect the city and so at the end we negotiated for our annual pass from 10 years which are told to four million dollars 409 000 a year to all three cities there's about 300 of that and then a cash payment uh reserved for three point three million so we negotiated for high total cash uh receipts of seven million 383 thousand dollars to satisfy our tax and equities and that's huge for us only would that be huge for you but that would teach for us the reason I got into the weeds is because every 30 000 I found was another forty five hundred dollars and monies that I could bargain with and use to negotiate and so these are some of the things that that we have done it kind of shows you how you can get there um but I think the key again is is being prepared knowing where the inequities are be able to find those inequitable Services modify them in a way that anybody could understand it and then communicate communicate communicate communicate okay so this is what what we uh we do in Rincon and maybe that'll help you a little bit as you try to look and see what you want to do okay