The battle of Brookhaven budget numbers broke out recently into clashing press releases.
DeKalb County officials recently issued a press release saying falling tax appraisals would mean a proposed city of Brookhaven would operate $360,554 in the red.
Proponents of the new city responded a few days later with a press release of their own that said the county had jumped the gun and that other revenues were rising so the new city actually would be $1,076,951 in the black.
Each side used newly released tax numbers to support its position.
The debate comes weeks before Brookhaven residents vote on whether to create a new city in an area bounded roughly by Chamblee, Dunwoody, Sandy Springs, Atlanta, I-85 and DeKalb-Peachtree Airport. Residents go to the polls July 31. If they approve the new city, it would be the most populous in the county.
The latest battle of budget numbers started when DeKalb County officials announced June 15 that new tax appraisal figures showed the proposed city of Brookhaven could start with less money than had been predicted.
County officials said they recalculated the proposed city’s revenues using taxes that would be collected on the 2012 tax digest, the total value of taxable properties in the area. The 2012 county digest, the county said, came in 6.82 percent lower than the 2011 digest.
The Carl Vinson Institute of the University of Georgia studied the feasibility of operating a city government in the area designated as Brookhaven and concluded the city would collect $6.786 million in property taxes and would operate with a $135,348 surplus, the county said in its release. But, the county release said, that calculation was done using the 2011 preliminary tax digest.
When county officials plugged in the preliminary 2012 numbers, projected Brookhaven tax collections fell to $6.291 million and a $360,554 deficit appeared in the budget.
Not so fast, Brookhaven Yes responded.
The county’s release came out just before another county announcement, that of new Homestead Option Sales Tax collections, the pro-city group said in its own press release on June 26.
Brookhaven Yes said the county had stronger-than-anticipated collections of the Homestead Option Sales Tax, or HOST. That tax is used to defray property taxes in DeKalb and a portion of the money is shared with DeKalb cities.
“We plugged in the new HOST numbers… ,” Brookhaven Yes said. “The result is that Brookhaven can expect to collect an estimated $1.35 million in additional HOST proceeds.”
“We’ve expected that it would be the case that a city of Brookhaven would run a surplus and the people who would be elected would be fiscally responsible to run a surplus,” said Brookhaven Yes spokeswoman Linley Jones.
Jones accused county officials of “running a fear campaign” against the city proposal. She called the county’s press release “just a political move.”
“It backfired because it was wrong,” she said.
But DeKalb spokesman Burke Brennen said county was trying only to provide information. “We’re not advocating a position one way or another,” he said. “We’re just disseminating the facts.”
