Local Option Sales Tax talk begins for City and County

Members of the Lumpkin County Board of Commissioners and Dahlonega City Council met on Thursday night in a special called meeting to discuss LOST.
And while the show’s finale which originally aired in 2010 is remembered as quite controversial, that was not the LOST that was discussed during the meeting.
Instead, the meeting was designed to discuss Local Option Sales Tax, or LOST for short, which is a one percent tax collected on all sales inside Lumpkin County, where the revenues are then split up between the city and county budgets. How these funds are split depends on the negotiated agreement between the two, which is renegotiated every 10 years.
“This is a critical revenue source,” said Ted Baggett of the UGA Carl Vinson Institute of Government. “We just talked a little bit ago about what percentage of the city and county budget this represents and you’re locking yourself in for 10 years unless you renegotiate somewhere halfway through. It can be difficult, challenging, whatever word you want to use.”
Seeing the importance of the negotiation, which is set to take place this year, establishing the split for the next decade starting in 2023, the Board of Commissioners and City Council agreed to hold a joint session in order to review the process and make sure everyone was on the same page as the two governmental bodies move toward the negotiations.
“I think the intent tonight is to give everyone a good working knowledge of the Local Option Sales Tax, what it’s intended to do, what the law states and then as we get into trying to decide the equitable split of the sales tax, then that’s when you look at things,” Board of Commissioner Chairman Chris Dockery said. “…One reason I wanted to do this is…because the last time I did this, and I certainly don’t mean to discredit anybody, city or county, it really became evident to me that there were elected officials that the only knowledge they had about Local Option Sales Tax was what they were being told by consultants.”
With that in mind, the two sides agreed to have Baggett come and give a presentation about the process of negotiating LOST and some tips to keep in mind.
The splits are negotiated between city and county every 10 years with the current split sitting at 75 percent of funds gathered going to the county and 25 percent going to the city. This amount was decided by a judge after disagreements from both sides forced the government entities into a legal battle.
Those disagreements led to baseball arbitration, where the sides submit a final best offer to a judge, who then decides between the two offers. With both sides arguing for a larger split, the city changed its bid back to the original amount, a 75/25 split, which the judge sided with in the ruling in October 2013.  
However, both sides feel confident that the issue will not come to lawsuits and squabbles this time around.
“I hope you have absolutely nothing to write about in The Dahlonega Nugget as it relates to Local Option Sales Tax,” Dockery said. “That is certainly my personal goal. It’s not that I don’t want you to have some good juicy news, I just don’t want it to be about us.”
Mayor JoAnne Taylor said she felt both sides were going at it with good faith.
“We’re both diving into the details in our respective governments,” she said. “I agree with Chris, I think we’re both coming at this with a spirit of compromise and understanding one another’s issues, because we’re not alone in having challenges.”
The two sides must come up with an agreement by December 30 and have to at least begin talks of the negotiation by July 1. However, Councilman Johnny Ariemma is anxious to start the process already.
“I just don’t want to take a subjective approach. I’m a numbers guy,” he said. “I’d like to see your numbers or at least have a good visual of what that looks like, but I certainly hope it’s not going to just be a subjective approach….I just want to see your position.”
Dockery and Taylor both agreed that it was too early to discuss detailed plans.
“It’s certainly early, this is more of a background,” he said. “I guess when we leave this room, everybody at least knows how to spell LOST. I feel like that’s a step in the right direction from where we were 10 years ago….Part of what I proposed…to try and fix LOST if you will, is what we’re doing in this very room tonight. And that’s have every elected official, before they are qualified to negotiate, sit down and have an independent third party to explain Local Option Sales Tax, and what it’s designed to do and the criteria and exactly what Ted did tonight. I think it’s certainly a step in the right direction.”