About Dawson County news. (Dawsonville, Georgia) 2015-current | View Entire Issue (June 29, 2022)
4A I DAWSON COUNTY NEWS I dawsonnews.com Wednesday, June 29,2022 "'"ADawson County Coverage Comparisons Dawson County, GA - Potential Coverage of VHF P25 System Digital VHF P25 Coverage »■ DAQ 3.4; Talk-In (radio to site); 95% Reliability Dawson County, GA - Potential Coverage of 700/800 P25 System Digital 700/800 MHt P25 Coverage >= DAQ 3.4; Talk-In (radio to site); 95% Reliability PortaW* In-aulMios Co<«rajco n Dlwtw County BOfd.f ■■ Mobile Coverage Portable On-Street Coverage ■■ Portable liv lull ding Cevorega Photo courtesy of the Dawson County Board of Commissioners Brian Barber used this coverage comparison map to show the differences between the two proposed radio upgrade plans. FROM 1A Radio almost a year of special purpose local option sales tax collections. As planning progresses, each initiative is expected to come back before the BOC at a future date for votes to release requests for price (RFPs). These projects must be funded in full before any other initiative in the SPLOST project list. The county’s radio system was last upgraded about ten years ago. Its current problems include lack ing coverage throughout the county when portable radios are used and inside buildings, heavy static, radios not transmitting to consoles inside the dispatch cen ter and an inability to communi cate with Hall, Forsyth, Cherokee and Cobb Counties. “I sincerely appreciate the Commissioners moving this radio project forward,” said Dawson County Sheriff Jeff Johnson. “This has been a desperately needed system that will greatly enhance our communications, resulting in greater levels of ser vice and security for our commu nity and public safety profession als.” Option one During the June 16 meeting, DCSO Maj. Greg Rowan gave a joint presentation about the pro posed radio system upgrades with Brian Barber of Federal Engineering, a consulting nation al public safety communications firm. Barber said the first option was to basically stay in the same fre quency band but upgrade it to Project 25 (P25), the standard for public safety communications. It would use Dawson County’s three existing sites while also adding a new site on Monument Road in Pickens County and using Forsyth County’s VHF P25 site. It would also entail new sub scribers, base stations and related equipment while leaving in a VHF (very high frequency) chan nel for interoperability and fire paging. The existing Forsyth site would improve mobile or mount ed radio coverage as well as por table coverage slightly. However, this option doesn’t help with por table in-building coverage, said Barber. The sites would also be con nected in a ring microwave net work or configuration, so if one link was to go down, the signal traffic would go in the opposite direction so communication wouldn’t be lost with the whole radio system. Barber elaborated that VHF is “a very difficult band” to deploy new systems in because of the challenge with finding new fre quencies, as was the case with Dawson County’s 2012 radio upgrade. Dawson’s current VHF is already capacity-constrained from limited channels, so a tran sition would be made more diffi cult. It’s also prone to environmental noise from things like lighting and building thermostats, which ends up impeding radio signals getting to an end user. “We don’t expect that problem to get better with VHF We expect it to get worse,” Barber said. “Your coverage in VHF might be adequate today, but I can’t guar antee to you that it’ll be adequate 10 years from now.” Option two Barber called the second option or alternative similar to alterna tive one in terms of leveraging the existing Dawson sites, but it involves moving to the 700- 800mhz P25 band and adding two more Forsyth sites to the five-prong configuration. It’s easier to get more channels in the latter band, with a dedicat ed bank of channels for public safety entities, and there’s not the same type of interference issues as VHF. Environmental noise isn’t as much of an issue. While it would take a few more sites to provide the same level of mobile coverage in option two as in the first one, the in-building coverage with the 700-800mhz system would be much better, Barber said. The more new infrastructure needed will initially make the radio system transition more dif ficult, but Federal Engineering has managed that move for agen cies across the country, he added. Barber used a diagram map to show the differences in types of coverage between the two upgrade options. With the dia gram, blue stood for mobile radio coverage, while yellow stood for portable outside coverage and green stood for portable in-build ing. “You can see the difference in- building coverage between the two alternatives is pretty drastic or significant,” Barber said. “The 700-800[mhz] option with the site configuration that we did in the second design would provide much more in-building coverage and portable outdoor coverage than alternative one would in VHF.” Dawson County could imple ment either option as a stand alone system which it owns and operates or look at sharing oppor tunities where an adjacent county, like Cobb or Hall, would already have a control network or system to connect to and reduce cost. The disadvantage there is that Dawson would be locked into the same upgrade plan and would have to upgrade at the same time as network partners, so funding would have to be in place for that, Barber said. Three of the neighboring coun ties are currently on VHF and three are on the 700-800mhz option, and all of the P25- adjacent systems are in that latter band range. Upgrade costs In terms of numbers, the coun ty would be looking at a capital cost of either $8-11 million for the first option versus $10-13.5 million for the second one. Projected costs were based on using radio-specific rather than cell towers. Barber pointed out that the sec ond option doesn’t have some of the VHF alternative’s risks, and there’d be more opportunities for cost-sharing with the 700- 800mhz option. If Dawson joined with Cobb’s network control center, the cost savings to expand it rather than buying a new one could be as much as $500,000. Similarly, since Forsyth is in the beginning stages of building a radio site on Old Federal Highway, Dawson could come in and partner with them to help build that site and reduce some of the costs and development time associated with that site build. He did remind the county com missioners that they’d have to be on the same upgrade cycle, which tends to be in the two-four year range, and design plans would similarly have to be done in part nership with that other entity. Intergovernmental agreements would also have to be in place for details about land ownership, funding and management. Dawson County could poten tially come to own the Pickens tower since it’d be at a new site. Partnering with Forsyth could entail co-ownership or a sharing agreement if that county builds it and Dawson wants to work out a sharing agreement to hop onto that site. There’s possibly enough room for Dawson to be added on at Forsyth’s Mollyview site, but a further analysis would have to be done to confirm that. Estimated support costs would be either $1.9 million vs. $2.4 million respectively for each option, both of which would include recurring upgrades to keep a system current. A three- year warranty would cover the chosen system’s deployment stage before those life cycle sup port plan costs, which are usually spread out over multiple years, kick in. “With the growth you guys are having here, I’d expect you guys are going to have to expand the system at some point. So you need to be on that upgrade path in order to do that,” Barber said. When Gaines asked about a potential life span for the pro posed system, Barber explained that P25 is a user-driven standard that continues to evolve as capa bilities are added. “I don’t think you’re investing in technology that has a horizon. It continues to evolve as it has for the last 25-plus years,” Barber said. The engineer also confirmed, per District 4 Commissioner Emory Dooley’s question, that the projected cost numbers are based off of Dawson building their own tower at the Forsyth Old Federal Highway site and doing things like structural analy ses at the Mollyview location. Barber said he could not guar antee firmer numbers until mov ing forward with an option, con sidering increased inflation in the market and higher costs in terms of steel and labor prices. Once the county decides which direction to go in, Federal Engineering will build the func tional specifications. Barber sug gested building a standalone option as a primary with another proposal for cost and network sharing to better anticipate both options’ costs and have more information on which to base their final decision. He doubted that prices for a radio project would decrease if inflation came under more con trol. “In the 36 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen the costs of radio systems go down,” he said. “It would not be a fair expectation and that if you were to wait...that it’d be less money later.” FROM 1A Camp Rogers said. This year’s Camp Invention theme was “Explore”, and the week was aimed at allowing stu dents to explore their creativity and innovation through fun, hands-on activities. Students brought in their own “inventor supplies” from home, demon strating that they didn’t need a robotics kit or special equipment in order to be creative. “Their ‘inventor supplies’ could be empty paper towel rolls, empty toilet paper rolls, empty shoe- boxes, empty bottles — showing that you can use the junk around your house to be creative,” Rogers said. Throughout the week, stu dents participated in several fun modules, including: • Marble Arcade: A module teaching stu dents about physics, engineering and scien tific principles like potential and kinetic energy as they design and build their own “marble arcade” game. • The Attic: A module teaching students about inventions that have changed the way that people create. • Robotic Aquatics: A module teaching stu dents about ocean research as they adopt their own aquatic ani mal and design a habi tat for it. • Space-Cation: A mod ule teaching students about space explora tion as they build their own “Spacepacks” and “Astro-Arm” devices and collect data on how animals can hatch and grow in space. Students also kept an “inven tor’s log” throughout the week, recording everything they did with each project and learning experience. “As a retired school teacher, it’s amazing to me that these students are integrating reading, writing, science and social studies all in a ‘play’-type atmosphere; they’re playing with science and it’s amazing,” Rogers said. Each year, Dawson County Schools has scholarship funds available to help students attend the camp. According to Rogers, this includes a generous donation from Nordson Corporation and an allotment from the Dawson County Board of Education. This year, scholarships included $10,000 from Nordson and $15,000 from the BOE. “Every penny of that goes to pay the students’ tuition to come to camp,” Rogers said. “The instructors are all paid through the National Inventors Society and the high school workers receive volunteer hours that they can accumulate toward their community service cords when they graduate.” The school system’s food ser vices provided free hot breakfasts and hot lunches for all of the campers, and the custodial staff kept the building clean after each day of camp, Rogers added. Each year, enrollment in Camp Invention has increased, and this year was no exception. Rogers said that, as word about Camp Invention spreads each year, the camp just keeps gaining populari ty. “The number increases every single year; we have 20 more stu dents that have shown up this year than from last year,” Rogers said. “We’ve got students all the way from Florida that relatives told other relatives about coming to camp last year and families made vacation plans to come visit grandparents so that they could actually come to camp — so we’ve got multiple counties, we’ve got multiple states repre sented, so overall the word has gotten out and we have had so many compliments.” This year’s Camp Invention was a huge success, Rogers said, and campers are already excited to return next year. “This year’s camp has been absolutely amazing,” Rogers said. “It allows organized learning to continue all through the summer — overall it has just been an amazing week.” NOTICE The Dawson County County Board of Commissioners does hereby announce that the millage rate will be set at a meeting to be held at the Dawson County Government Center, 25 Justice Way, on August 4,2022 at 6:00 pm and pursuant to the requirements of O.C.G.A. § 48-5-32 does hereby publish the following presentation of the current year's tax digest and levy, along with the history of the tax digest and levy for the past five years. CURRENT 2022 PROPERTY TAX DIGEST AND 5 YEAR HISTORY OF LEVY UNINCORPORATED 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 U Real & Personal 1,394,032,646 1,572,997,915 1,593,936,454 1,709,619,583 1,780,490,982 2,068,294,890 N | Motor Vehicles 28,320,790 22,736,970 18,877,500 16,163,420 14,599,480 13,548,070 N V Mobile Homes 952,109 1,493,910 1,711,047 1,771,544 2,012,335 2,133,907 C A Timber - 100% 96,561 190,449 200,000 23,575 42,210 69,566 o U Heavy Duty Equipment 0 0 0 0 0 0 p E Gross Digest 1,423,402,106.00 1,597,419,244.00 1,614,725,001.00 1,727,578,122.00 1,797,145,007.00 2,084,046,433.00 o Less Exemptions 201,405,457 222,450,006 223,081,756 237,439,595 238,279,470 225,792,886 R NET DIGEST VALUE 1,221,996,649.00 1,374,969,238.00 1,391,643,245.00 1,490,138,527.00 1,558,865,537.00 1,858,253,547.00 T E D R Gross Maintenance & Operation Millage 14.4250 14.5990 13.0790 13.0310 13.0630 12.3455 A T Less Rollbacks E (Local Option Sales Tax & 6.2870 6.4610 4.9900 5.1460 5.4380 5.1230 E Insurance Premium) A NET M&O MILLAGE RATE 8.1380 8.1380 8.0890 7.8850 7.6250 7.2225 TAX NET M&O TAXES LEVIED $9,944,609 $11,189,500 $11,257,002 $11,749,742 $11,886,350 $13,421,236 INCORPORATED 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 1 N c Real & Personal 102,426,129 122,042,206 134,753,874 152,060,737 171,242,679 202,876,805 Motor Vehicles 54,600 49,200 34,090 93,380 205,940 275,210 o V Mobile Homes 0 0 0 0 0 0 R A Timber - 100% 0 0 0 13,913 0 0 P U Heavy Duty Equipment 0 0 0 0 0 0 R E Gross Digest 102,480,729.00 122,091,406.00 134,787,964.00 152,168,030.00 171,448,619.00 203,152,015.00 A Less Exemptions 13,990,679 17,519,295 20,860,421 23,550,047 25,461,001 26,693,464 T NET DIGEST VALUE 88,490,050.00 104,572,111.00 113,927,543.00 128,617,983.00 145,987,618.00 176,458,551.00 D R Gross Maintenance & Operation Millage 14.4250 14.5990 13.0790 13.0310 13.0630 12.3455 A R E A T E Less Rollback (Local Option Sales Tax) 6.2870 6.4610 4.9900 5.1460 5.4380 5.1230 A NET M&O MILLAGE RATE 8.1380 8.1380 8.0890 7.8850 7.6250 7.2225 TAX NET M&O TAXES LEVIED $720,132 $851,008 $921,560 $1,014,153 $1,113,156 $1,274,472 TOTAL COUNTY 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 TOTAL DIGEST VALUE 1,310,486,699.00 1,479,541,349.00 1,505,570,788.00 1,618,756,510.00 1,704,853,155.00 2,034,712,098.00 % TOTAL M&O TAXES LEVIED $ 10,664,741 $ 12,040,507 $ 12,178,562 $ 12,763,895 $ 12,999,505 $ 14,695,708 Net Tax $ Increase $594,460 $1,375,767 $ 138,055 $ 585,333 $ 235,610 $ 1,696,203 Net Tax % Increase 5.90% 12.90% 1.15% 4.81% 1.85% 13.05%
