Alexander explains County budget to local GOP

The Madison County Republican Party had its monthly meeting at the Old Country Store on Monday, May 13, and County Commissioner Carl Alexander was the main speaker at the event.

Alexander, who is the chair of the budget committee – among other committees for the Commission – gave an update on the Madison County budget.

The budget season has gone considerably smoother than usual.

“We got all departments’ budgets in on time, and that allowed all the committee members plenty of time to give everything a look over,” Alexander said.

When discussing the Jackson-Madison County School System budget, he said the County’s funding of the school system stayed at $48.1 million for the year, but $1.3 million was added to education capital for new buses and a few security projects in the school system.

He also discussed the budgeted 3% raise for each department’s salary line item, giving each department head a little more money to work with to offer raises to their employees.

“The Commissioners know that the face of the County government are the people at the tag office where you pay your fees or at the health department or wherever our citizens do business,” Alexander said. “The face of the County isn’t us on the Commission. Those employees are our most valuable asset, and we wanted to take care of them.”

Alexander also mentioned the committee opted to put a couple of pennies of revenue back into debt service. Because of the County’s increased revenue, a penny in the budgeting process equals about $319,000, up $6,000 over last year’s penny allocation.

Alexander said the County is positioning itself to be in much better shape than it was a couple years ago when it comes to being in debt after paying off between $11 million and $11.5 million in debt service each year for the last several years.

“Right now we’re paying $1 million a year for the work that went into renovating [Jackson Central-Merry],” Alexander said. “In 2027, that’s when the balloon note will be due for JCM.

“Unless something crazy happens in the next couple years, we’ll be able to simply write a check and pay that off and bring our total debt to below $50 million, and it was at more than $100 million a couple years ago.”

There were also updates from Nashville from State Senator Ed Jackson and Representative Chris Todd on the heels of the end of the legislative session.

They discussed the work that was done in getting people in Nashville onboard with the work to fund improvements at McKellar-Sipes Regional Airport, the apparently largest tax cut in the history of the state with the elimination of the property portion of the franchise tax and the fact some businesses will be eligible for a tax refund based on how much they’d paid because of the franchise tax over the last three years.

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news