Thomasville is one of six cities served by Community Network Services (CNS) in rural southwest Georgia. We’ve covered Thomasville and CNS in the past, highlighting the benefits of reliable high-speed broadband in these remote rural communities. But one benefit we haven’t covered yet is quite remarkable – Thomasville residents have been paying zero fire tax thanks in large part to revenues from CNS. The City’s fire tax first hit zero in 2012 and was recently maintained there by a Thomasville City Council vote in September.
Thomasville feeds its General Fund with net income (what the private sector would call profit) from its utility services. For 2013, this net income is estimated to reach $8.5 million. What’s more, Thomasville residents enjoy utility prices below the state average. So nobody can complain the City is taking advantage of utility customers by charging excessive rates.
According to a recent Public Service Commission survey, Thomasville residents pay $3.32 per month below the state average per 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. And CNS customers who bundle services see annual savings of up to $420. It’s a true win-win – residents get affordable utilities and the City applies the net income to running public services like the police and fire departments, lowering property taxes in the process.
The result is millions in tax savings for Thomasville residents since 2009, when the City set its sights on phasing out the fire tax. In that year, the City collected $1.7-million in fire taxes. In 2010, the City dropped the rate to bring in $995,000. And in 2011, the last year a fire tax was levied, $610,000 was taxed. Based on the 2009 fire tax collection, Thomasville residents have been spared almost $5.2-million in fire taxes since 2010. Speaking about the zero fire tax accomplishment in 2012, Thomasville Mayor, Max Beverly, said “Without the City’s enterprise funds like Electric and CNS, we would not have been able to meet this goal.”
CNS is remarkable for another reason. It represents a high degree of collaboration among multiple cities in different counties – a model which could help more rural communities build successful networks. Thomasville could have built a network on its own, but it saw greater benefit in combining forces with nearby municipalities, despite the extra coordination effort involved. The added scale and cost sharing afforded by this model likely played a big role in the benefits Thomasville has reaped from CNS. Rural communities, take note.