MOUNT DORA CITY HALL UPDATE: September 10 meeting

(Mount Dora Buzz file photo)

By Marc Crail,
Mount Dora City Council, District 4 Representative 

​This month both of our regular City Council meetings are on Thursdays rather than our usual Tuesday meetings. The reason for this change is to comply with state deadlines with our budget process.

As usual I have selected several agenda and discussion items from our nearly 5 hour series of meetings to highlight for you. Please keep in mind that I'm reporting to you from my own personal perspective not as an official representative of Mount Dora City Council as a whole.

After nearly 25 hours of public discussion and deliberation over the past several months we have closed in on the millage rate needed to fund our 2020-2021 city budget and I've got some good news to report to you. In my last report a couple of weeks ago I said that I thought that we would ultimately be able to reduce the needed millage rate from the 6.2 mills that appeared on the TRIM Notice we all received in the mail last month to 5.977. When you're building a budget, you keep tweaking the numbers based on new and better information that you get along the way. How much money will we get from the State or County, etc.? How can we maintain a safe level of reserves? When will our tourist driven economy begin to recover?

We have now determined that we can balance our budget at the even lower "Roll-Back" rate of 5.9603 mills. We have now tentatively set the 2020-2021 millage rate at that Roll-Back rate and baring some unlikely financial problem we will finalize that 5.9603 mills rate in two weeks on Thursday 9/24 at 5:30 p.m. That means that the Mount Dora portion of your tax bill for next year will not increase in most cases. These are all public meetings and if you want to see how the sausage is made or make comments or ask questions you are welcome to attend. That meeting will be in the large Mount Dora Community Building where social distancing is possible. Masks are required.

We passed a number of Resolutions. Several of these resolutions included sizable grants from state, county or federal sources. That grant money allows us to do more needed projects with fewer local tax dollars. Here are a couple of examples. The first is a grant from the Lake County Water Authority that will pay 50% of the anticipated $133,000 cost of designing and installing a "Baffle Box" pollution capturing device at Lake Gertrude.

Along the same lines, we accepted $1,500,000 from a County Economic Development grant to help pay for a master lift station. The rest of that project's costs will ultimately be reimbursed by developer funded Impact Fees.

The Fire Assessment fee that we each pay on our homes will remain steady at $219 for next year. Commercial properties pay into that also but the amount they pay depends on the square footage of their business. Obviously a large business like Walmart or Publix pays more than a small mom and pop store. We will be investigating possibilities for somehow decreasing that Fire Assessment fee over the next several months but any decrease wouldn't take place until next year.

Our city's "Charter" is very much like our country's Constitution. You might recall that last year we voted to approve several "Charter Amendments". At least once every five years a Charter Review Committee made up of seven citizen volunteers carefully reviews our Charter and recommends changes that they believe will improve the operation of Mount Dora. As I recall there were five or six Charter Amendments on last year's ballot and all of them were approved by the voters. Since last year's amendments won approval two additional Charter Amendments will be on the ballot for your consideration this year. You will be receiving more complete information about them in the next few weeks. If approved they would change the terms of our mayor and city council members from two years to four years and would limit any mayor or city council member to serving no more than eight years in the same position. FYI, all of our current City Council members fully support passage of these Charter Amendments.

Since we've been talking a lot about taxes lately I've got a quote for you from Oliver Wendell Holmes who once said; "I hate paying taxes but I love the civilization they give me".

Thanks for your interest in our city and thanks too for allowing me to serve as your District 4 City Council Representative.

By Marc Crail,
Mount Dora City Council, District 4 Representative 

​For more news and events in Mount Dora, Tavares & Eustis, click here.  ​​​​ For local things to do, click here and for the area's free mobile app, click here. ​