Gwinnett Daily Post

DULUTH - The public will have a chance to sound off about taxes, reassessment and rollback millage rates at three hearings planned by Duluth for this month and in July.

The meetings, approved by the City Council on Monday, are scheduled for 8:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. June 28, and 7 p.m. July 9. All will be at Duluth City Hall.

The millage rate approved in the final action on the city's $43,943,744 2008 Fiscal Year budget is 5.191, remaining the same as in the current budget. But the rollback millage rate, determined by Gwinnett County after a widespread tax reassessment, is 4.847.

When the total digest of taxable property is prepared, Georgia law requires a rollback millage rate be computed that will produce the same total revenue on the current year's new digest that last year's millage rate would have produced had no reassessments occurred, city officials said.

Millage rates are applied to 40 percent of the assessed value of a home.

"For those whose property was reassessed, the tax bill will probably go up," City Clerk Teresa Lynn said after the meeting. "We will present the facts and show what the rollback calculation would be."

The council meeting on Monday is the only one scheduled for June. The panel normally meets on the second and fourth Mondays, but the June 28 meeting was cancelled to allow members to attend the annual meeting of the Georgia Municipal Association.

The council members attend each year to gather ideas to bring back for the city staff to handle, quipped mayor pro-tem Douglas Mundrick, who conducted the meeting.

In other business, the council:

• Awarded a bid from Frazier Service Co. Inc. for heating, ventilation and air conditioning work at the Red Clay Theatre located in an old church building near the Town Green.

•Awarded four bids for landscaping work including $71,999.80 to Finish Line Landscape, Bunten Park; $6,615, to A&A Landscape for medians on Peachtree Industrial Boulevard; $29,307 to Russell Landscape Co. for work at both the old and new City Halls, the Town Green, and Taylor Park, Phase II; and $11,675 to Imagescapes, for the new public safety building at Buford Highway and Davenport Road.