City of Dublin joins call for vote on sales tax 

The Dublin City Council approved an intergovernmental agreement Friday with Laurens County and other municipalities to call a referendum on a floating local option sales tax, or FLOST, for property tax relief.

The agreement will allow a referendum for Laurens County voters to decide if they want to offset property taxes with a sales tax. 

“The agreement sets out how the money from that sales tax would be split between the county and the cities with 100 percent of the funds to be used to replace property taxes,” said Dublin Mayor Joshua Kight. 

The special meeting by the city, and the other municipalities who have also set up meetings for early this week, had to be done by a certain time to give enough notice to call the election in November, said Dublin City Manager Josh Powell.

According to Kight, the city and county agreed to cap the amount of increase and asset values for homesteads. Because of this, the law gives the local governments the option of letting the voters decide on a penny sales tax to reduce the tax burden.

“The current project is that an extra penny sales tax under this FLOST would generate about $13.5 million per year countywide,” Kight said. “That money would be used to reduce dollar for dollar property taxes. The bottom line is, this is property tax relief.”

Kight said the benefit of the FLOST is having the sales tax collected by people who are traveling through the county and city. 

“I would say the sales tax doesn’t make sense for all communities, but a community like Dublin has people stopping at the interstate and coming into town from other places,” the mayor said. “It makes a lot of sense for us because you are replacing your personal property tax dollars with sales tax dollars from people who are from all over the state.” 

An interstate highway is a big help, he added.

“Look at the amount of people who travel from all over the country and through Georgia who travel down I-16 and will stop at our restaurants and hotels,” Kight said. “Collecting an extra penny of sales tax from them and using it to reduce property taxes for the people who live here and own property here is just a good deal.” 

The county commissioners are scheduled to meet at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday.