Fannin County Residents Deserve a New Library

My View by Jim Yacavone

(July 2, 2016)

There’s a big debate at the county over how to divvy up the SPLOST funds if the SPLOST referendum passes on the November ballot. There are many competing interests within the county making a case to get a share of the money. I was going to work in an analogy to pigs trying to feed at a small trough but I don’t want to offend any of the involved parties. 

SPLOST stands for Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax. It allows county voters to vote to tax themselves an additional one percent sales tax to pay for county “capital outlay projects” such as roads, streets, bridges, police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, garbage trucks, and other major equipment “for the use or benefit of the citizens of the entire county.” The ballot referendum must specify how the additional revenue will be spent, and this requires the county commission to pass an ordinance or resolution providing the details.

Fannin Voters last approved a SPLOST in November 2010 to start in October 2011. It expires September 2017. The new SPLOST, if approved, will start in October 2017 and, presumably, run for six years, the same as the last SPLOST.

The commissioners haven’t made up their minds how the new SPLOST money will be spent. This means they decided the county needed the additional revenue before they decided what it was needed for. It’s clear the commission is counting on the SPLOST being approved in order to pay for needed capital outlay projects. When government starts counting on an additional tax there’s nothing special about it. It’s just another tax.

That being said, the one good argument in support of funding government needs through SPLOST rather than an increase in the property tax is that because it’s a sales tax it also falls on visitors to Fannin County. That relieves Fannin residents of part of the tax burden. Hey, anytime we can get someone else to help pay for our projects is okay by me.

Whatever the merits of Fannin’s SPLOST and the projects it will pay for, voters should closely scrutinize all taxing and spending decisions by government. Government has an insatiable appetite when it comes to money and is always eager to spend our money on something. And when you give government money, it’s sure to spend every last dime.

But that’s not the point of this column. The point is to argue that some portion of the SPLOST revenue—a small portion I might add—should be used to help build a new and larger library. Fannin residents do not have the library they deserve. The current library in the courthouse is about 6,000 square feet. State standards for new libraries say that Fannin County’s approximately 25,000 residents should have a 15,000 square foot library. That does not even address future population growth.

So far the library has been given short shrift by the commission. This is terribly short sighted on their part. The library is used by all segments of our community. It is important to the education of our youth. Studies show that public libraries are engines of economic growth and contribute to local development through early education, employment services and small-business development. Other studies show that libraries have a measurable positive impact on the local economy and contribute to the stability, safety and quality of life of their communities.

Regardless of whether the commissioners use the library themselves (I am skeptical), they should remember that our library has over 6,900 active library cards, and that’s a lot of votes.

That’s my view. What’s yours?