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The Decatur County Commissioners met for their last meeting of August on Tuesday evening. Following the invocation and the Pledge of Allegiance, the commissioners voted to approve the agenda, as well as the minutes from the previous meeting. The commissioners did slightly ammend the agenda for the evening, replacing an update about a lease for a proposed solar site with a request from the district attorney’s office for a grant.

The first item of business on the agenda was considering a resolution to adopt the millage rate. According to County Administrator Alan Thomas, the county millage rate will see a slight reduction this year, from 8.94 to 8.91. The commissioners voted to approve the rate.

Next on the agenda, the commissioners heard from the Bainbridge Director of Community and Economic Development, Steve O’Neil, regarding the proposed building permit fee schedule. According to O’Neil, these changes to permits were prompted by recent state legislation, specifically House Bill 461.

“The first thing is I reached out to neighboring jurisdictions to see what they were doing,” O’Neil said. “One of them said ‘We’re not changing’, which I thought was kind of a novel approach to this.” After reaching out to professional associations and analyzing the city’s prior permit fees, they came to develop basic goals, including budget neutrality. “We’re not necessarily trying to make money by raising the permit fees, but we don’t want to be losing money either by changing to a whole other system,” O’Neil said.

Another goal the city set when looking at permit fees was easy calculation: “I wanted something easy to calculate, so a contractor can easily figure out or approximate what his permit fee’s going to be before he even comes into the office.”

The city also aimed at its fees being comparable to neighboring jurisdictions. “House Bill 461 did not specify the preferred method for calculating its building permits, it kind of left it open to us… all it did was simply prohibit calculating fees based on cost of construction, which is typically what we do. You can’t do that anymore.” With that no longer an option, O’Neil stated that the next choice for calculating fees was the project square footage.

“You can’t fake the square footage,” he said, adding, “Not all permit fees would be based on square footage, however. Certain things we looked at when we started looking at the statistics, your residential electrical permits are never over $100 generally… a number of our fees are going to be flat fees.”

After some discussion of the fee schedule, O’Neil also presented before the commissioners a text amendment, which would define a home occupation in the county’s unified development ordinance; it previously did not have one listed. Some of the commissioners raised issues with this, citing concerns over how it could impact certain businesses being able to operate from homes. Ultimately, the commissioners voted to approve the fee schedule, while the text amendment was tabled.

Following this, the commissioners heard the Georgia Forestry Commission’s annual report. They heard extensively about the Commission’s rules regarding controlled burns and burn permits, as well as their assistance in fighting fires in other states.

Following this report, the commissioners considered a memorandum of understanding with the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency, which relates to a grant. This grant would be worth $24,660, specifically for prosecutor training. The commissioners voted to approve.

Following this, the commissioners approved the errors and release report, before giving their closing remarks. The meeting was then adjourned.