County audit shows $3.8 million surplus
By Carlton Fletcher
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LEESBURG, Georgia (Albany Herald) — When Billy Mathis boasts that Lee County employees “watch the bottom line on a daily basis,” he’s not just handing out hollow platitudes.
That eye on the bottom line and the ‘fiscal responsibility” that has become the watchword of the Lee Commission is paying big dividends for the county.
A recently completed audit of the county’s Fiscal 2022 general fund showed that, for the fourth straight year, the Lee County government had achieved a surplus, this one to the tune of $3.8 million.
“We’re very pleased, obviously,” Mathis, the Lee Commission’s chairman, said. “We’ve really been working to build our fund balance, and the last four years we’ve been able to increase that from $12 million to right around $20 million.
“Our staff does a really good job of watching the bottom line on a daily basis, and the commission takes pride in its fiscal responsibility. And I want to make it clear that this funding does not include federal grant dollars.”
As for the money Lee County received from the federal American Rescue Act, Mathis said the county used those funds to improve broadband, to purchase and make improvements on first responder communications system and to improve infrastructure in the county.
“We looked at that federal money as ‘pennies from heaven,’” the Lee Commission chairman said. “We talked about it and came up with a plan to leverage those dollars. We invested $1.2 million in broadband expansion from the first half our federal funds, and that allowed us to leverage those funds into a $20 million broadband expansion project. We’re doing the same thing with money from the second half of our federal funds, using it to invest in water and sewer projects that we hope will allow us to leverage it again into additional grant funding.”
The county used some of the federal funds for a badly needed upgrade of its emergency communications system, and Mathis said the county hopes to expand infrastructure with the second round of funding.
“We really sat down and talked about that (federal) money; we wanted to use it in a way that would allow us to continue improving the quality of life in our community,” he said. “We knew the more skin we had in the game, the better chance we’d have of landing other grants.
“We’re doing lots of good things in Lee County. We’re still building 150-200 houses a year and the business growth is phenomenal. There’s a lot going on in Lee County.”
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