Frank proposes cuts in county property tax rate, law director’s budget

Note: This story was last updated at 9:46 p.m.

Anderson County Mayor Terry Frank on Wednesday proposed cutting the property tax rate by 1.62 cents and reducing the county law director’s budget by 16.5 percent.

It would be a $52,069 decrease in the budget of Anderson County Law Director Jay Yeager, who said he would have to lay off one of his two staff members.

Frank proposed reducing the property tax rate by 1.62 cents through a restructuring of the Alternatives to Incarceration Program, a relatively new program that lost its director in March.

Frank presented her proposed $23 million general fund budget to the Anderson County Budget Committee on Wednesday. It could apply to the fiscal year that starts July 1.

“This is about money,” Frank told the Budget Committee of her proposal to reduce the law director’s budget, according to a press release. “This isn’t about personalities.”

She said a report compiled by the county Budget Office showed that Anderson County has had a 1,630 percent increase in liability claims since 2003, and the county law director’s office budget has increased by 1,333 percent since 1998.

Frank said the average cost per resident for the law director’s office—$4.21 per citizen—is nearly twice that of other counties of comparable size.

And she compared Yeager’s $137,903 salary to the $161,805 salary of the Knox County law director, pointing out that Knox County has more than five times as many residents. Yeager’s proposed salary, including benefits, is $177,217 for the fiscal year that starts July 1, Frank said.

“I’m just asking for savings to help other departments, the fee offices, with state-mandated increases,” the mayor said.

But on Friday, Yeager said some of Frank’s claims are flawed or false, including the suggestion that he has generated more liability claims. He called the allegations personal and political, and difficult to respond to.

Yeager said his office doesn’t generate liability claims and doesn’t settle them. They are generated by Anderson County departments, and most of them are attributed to jail overcrowding, he said.

He said comparing his office to Knox County’s is flawed. That office has six attorneys and a half-dozen staff members, while his office includes only him, a paralegal, and a secretary.

He also said Frank failed to take into account the amount his office has generated through delinquent taxes and title searches when she cited the increase in his department’s budget. Ten percent of the delinquent taxes go back to the county, not to his office, and $150 per title search is returned to the county, and not to his office, said Yeager said, who is hired and fired by the Anderson County Commission and reports to a Legal Services Committee.

Saying he didn’t deserve the criticism, the law director said he worked an average of 57 hours per week last year, including on weekends and snow days, and he calculated his pay at a little less than $50 per hour.

Frank said restructuring the Alternatives to Incarceration Program could save $42,778. She proposed giving taxpayers a 1.62-cent refund from a two-cent property tax rate increase that was approved a few years ago to fund the new Alternatives to Incarceration Program, which was meant to find ways to reduce overcrowding in the county jail. That smaller tax increase was part of a larger 16.2-cent hike that was used in part to pay for a county jail expansion.

The other 0.38 cents of the two-cent increase, or about $58,000 total, could be used to restructure Alternatives to Incarceration and “make better use of already existing community programs that are meant to help reduce recidivism and inmate overcrowding,” Frank said. She proposed using some money to provide a stipend for volunteers to organize and oversee the rehabilitative programs that are already in place.

In addition, Frank said the county could:

• allocate funding to increase the use of home monitoring devices for offenders,
• allocate funding for lobbying to reduce health care costs associated with county jail inmates, and
• increase funding to the Seventh Judicial District Drug Court. That program “almost mirrors the make-up of the Alternatives to Incarceration program and is nearly a duplication of services,” the mayor said.

If County Commission chooses not to reduce the property tax rate by 1.62 cents, Frank said she has proposed the 16-member legislative body could instead use it to fund five additional fulltime corrections officers for the jail.

Anderson County’s current property tax rate is $2.503 for the city of Clinton, $2.35 for the city of Oak Ridge, and $2.532 for unincorporated parts of the county and Lake City, Norris, and Oliver Springs.