Commissioners Mike Stiehl, Debbie Bell, and Ed Norden sit in preparation for their final meeting of 2012. It was Commissioner's Stiehl's final formal meeting with this Board of Commissioners before he leaves office in January.
The Fremont County Board of Commissioners gathered for a brief but very important special meeting on December 19th. To meet statutory deadlines the Board of Commissioners must certify the mill levies of every governmental entity in the county that collects property taxes. The property tax mill levies are certified for tax collections by County Treasurer Pat McFarland. The mill levies are calculated against the assessed values in each taxing district as reported by County Assessor Stacey Seifert.
The countywide assessed value for tax collections on the 2013 Fremont County budget is $436,704,000. That’s up slightly from the $432,128,000 that was certified a year ago for the 2012 county budget. It also compares to an assessed value of $451,821,000 for the 2011 budget year. The $19.7 million drop in assessed value from 2011 to 2012 was due in large part to an adjustment to personal property at the Holcim Cement Plant east of Florence along with other declines in residential values.
The Commissioners also approved a pair of resolutions that corrected some language in budget resolutions that had been adopted at the December 11th regular meeting. Those resolutions reflected the correct amounts Fremont County expects to collect in 2013 property taxes from the 12.924 mills that the county can legally collect next year and the amounts of money to be appropriated for spending in the 2013 county budget.