Dougherty County SPLOST projects list carries $36 million price tag

ALBANY — The 28 projects on Dougherty County’s list of proposed expenditures for a penny sales tax includes the usual capital projects like improvements to buildings, parks and vehicles. But a few of the projects this time around are unique.

Among those are $1 million for an industrial park and an equal amount to go toward a law enforcement academy at Moultrie Technical College. The list also includes $1 million to assist the Albany Museum of Art’s move from Gillionville Road to downtown and $500,000 for improvements at Hugh Mills Stadium.

The county anticipates that the eighth special-purpose local-option sales tax (SPLOST), which will go before voters this year for approval, would raise about $36 million, County Administrator Michael McCoy said. That is based on the previous split of the revenue with the city, of which Albany receives 64 percent and the county 36 percent.

“We have $70 million in requests, so we had to adjust that to under $30 million to meet the requirements for Chehaw, Flint RiverQuarium and the stadium project,” McCoy said. “We’re always in competition to hold onto our (state high school) track meet. It’s the third-largest event in this community and the third-largest in terms of economic impact.”

To adjust to some of the cuts to make the amount come in within the amount of revenue expected, some projects will be paid for with the transportation special-purpose local-option sales tax (T-SPLOST).

The funding for the industrial park is needed, Commissioner Clinton Johnson, who is also a member of the Albany-Dougherty County Economic Commission, said during a Wednesday telephone interview.

“We put in $1 million in SPLOST as our contribution,” he said. “If you think about it, the last industrial park we had is the one Georgia Pacific purchased, and they purchased the whole industrial park.

“Recently the state EDC has been looking for mini-sites for large corporations, and we just wanted to have something to put our hat in the ring. You’re going to always want to have some land readily available.”

For Commissioner Victor Edwards, the list is a good start, but there could be other needs identified later that are bigger priorities.

“I’m looking forward to completing some of the projects on it, but it still needs a lot of fine tuning,” he said. “There’s some projects that need to be added. There’s some projects where maybe they don’t need as much money as requested.

“I want to be able to look at it very closely and evaluate some of the projects we need to do and some of the projects that we may have overlooked in the past. There may be some recreation projects like Eames Park where we haven’t done things in the past. We might want to complete some projects, like Putney Park.”

Some of the larger items on the list presented this week to commissioners include $4.2 million for storm drainage, $3.6 million for firetrucks and equipment, $3.4 million for station equipment and improvements for Dougherty County Emergency Services, and $2.9 million for equipment to maintain roads, streets and bridges.

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