An Operations-Minded Approach to Fully Funding Hickman County
Hickman County recently relied on draining nearly $10 million from its reserve funds and passing a 9-cent property tax increase just to balance the books. This is an unsustainable trajectory. We cannot continually ask District 7 property owners to bail out the county. Drawing on my MBA and my experience managing a $45 million budget, I will champion a business-minded approach to funding our county. We can fully fund our schools, emergency services, and roads without raising taxes by aggressively diversifying our revenue streams and treating the county budget like a high-performance operation.
Growing the Pie, Not the Tax Rate: The most effective way to lower the tax burden on individual homeowners and farmers is to ensure commercial entities are shouldering their fair share. We do not need to raise the rate; we need to expand the base. By successfully executing our plan to recruit 10 to 15 mid-size businesses to our designated growth areas, we will generate massive influxes of commercial property tax and business tax revenue, entirely shielding residential taxpayers from future hikes.
Capturing "Outside" Sales Tax via Tourism: Every time a visitor comes to Hickman County for the National Banana Pudding Festival, stays in a local rental, or floats the Duck River, they are paying Hickman County's 2.75% local option sales tax and hotel/motel taxes. This is "outside" money funding our "inside" needs. By strategically elevating our cultural and natural tourism assets, we create a stable, non-tax revenue stream injected directly into the county general fund by people who don't even live here.
Developer Impact and Mitigation Fees: Growth should pay for itself. Right now, when a large-scale developer builds a high-density subdivision, Hickman County taxpayers are often left holding the bag to upgrade the surrounding roads and water lines. By enforcing strict concurrency policies, we require outside corporate developers to foot the bill for infrastructure upgrades before they build. Forcing developers to pay for the impact they create is a massive cost-saving measure for the county.
Aggressive Grant Acquisition: Every dollar we secure from the state or federal government is a dollar we do not have to extract from local taxpayers. I will implement a systematic, data-driven pipeline to target infrastructure, public safety, and rural development grants, utilizing outside capital to modernize our county.
Maximizing Internal Efficiencies (The $45M Approach): When you manage an operational budget of $45 million across 16 locations, you learn how to identify hidden waste. I will push for rigorous, data-driven audits of county procurement, energy usage, and administrative overhead. By modernizing our internal processes and eliminating inefficiencies, we can keep millions of existing tax dollars in the bank, turning cost savings into newly available capital for essential services.