Gordon County Schools continue to operate on borrowed money while waiting for the county's 2009 tax digest to be approved at the state level.

Meanwhile, Superintendent Bill McCown said, the district is operating off of the tenative 2009-2010 budget using loans from two banks.

“We cannot continue to operate on a tentative budget,” he said. “It would be beneficial to the school district for the issues surrounding the tax digest to be taken care of as soon as possible.”

Despite two extensions of the deadline, Gordon County officials have yet to submit a tax digest to the state and are still wading through tax appeals.

Without digest numbers from the county, the schools cannot set a millage rate, and therefore cannot send out the 2009 property tax bills until the county's digest is approved.

The county school system is running much of its operations on the aforementioned loans: a $2 million loan from North Georgia National Bank with a 3.25 percent interest rate loan, and a $3.5 million loan from Regions bank, with a 2.76 percent interest rate loan.

GCS Financial Director Gail Farriba explained these are tax anticipation notes, which allows them to borrow money without any collateral or a down payment. Money is due by Dec. 31.



"This allows us to pay teachers salaries, maintain operation expenses and we haven't had to do this for several years, said Farriba.

“We will payback (the loans) with the property taxes,” said Farriba. “If we don’t have it by then, then we would renew the notes.”

As of last week, the board had not sat down and submitted a tax digest or crunched any numbers to submit.

According to Farriba, mileage numbers were submitted last year on Oct. 27. The mileage rate was 17.50, which resulted in $56,127,077.

"The board will meet on Dec. 7 to adopt the millage rate and then the board of commissioners will meet on the morning of Dec. 8 to approve that rate," Farriba said.

Then, rate will be taken to the state for approval.

But Chief Tax Assesor Wayne Walters said the county can’t submit a digest until the num-bers of outstanding appeals dip below 5 percent of the 26,000 parcels in the county.

The county received more than 2,300 appeals hiring McCormick and Assoc. to reevaluate every parcel.

Walters said this is the first time the county has outsourced an evaluation since 1966 and, when assessments went out, he knew immediately that some of them were “off.”

McCown said that although the fiscal restraints are difficult for adults to deal with, Gordon County Schools are doing everything possible to keep constraints from impacting the students’ education.

Also helping to keep the system afloat are spending resolutions, each of which is an estimated twelfth of last year's budget.