County commissioners were briefed on the financial details of a bond to upgrade the county’s emergency radio system for which they plan to seek voter support in November on July 10.
Lauren MacMillan, a consultant from Piper Sandler, the company that has been helping the county prepare the bond question, detailed the property tax assessments that would be needed to support the project. Covering $24 million of the project’s projected $26 million budget will require a property tax assessment of between 20 and 46 cents per thousand dollars of assessed value, depending on the bond’s term, according to MacMillan.
The project to build a new system has been ongoing since a report commissioned in 2019 and released in 2020 showed that the current system, built between 2001 and 2003, was at risk of failures that could not be repaired. A second report, released in the same year, recommended that the county construct a new, digital system and provided a conceptual design with a budget of $20 million.
In the intervening years, the project’s estimated budget has grown to $26 million, which will include upgraded equipment at 12 existing radio tower sites and the addition of one new tower. A $2 million federal appropriation was awarded to the county to support the project last year but attempts to find further outside funding sources have not born fruit, Tillamook County Chief of Staff Rachel Hagerty said at the meeting.
As the funding gap came into focus, Hagerty began to lay the groundwork for a bond question in support of the project late last year, contracting a firm to conduct a public opinion poll on support for the bond. Results from that poll showed that half of respondents supported the bond based on ballot language alone, with that number rising even further when context was added.
Those results gave commissioners the confidence to move forward with the bond preparation process and they approved the hiring of a firm to manage the bond question and another to handle public outreach. After a competitive bidding process, Piper Sandler was selected for the bond specifics, while Praxis Political was retained to engage the public.
Final paperwork for the bond question is due at the end of July, and MacMillan brought three potential bond questions with varying durations before the board of commissioners.
A bond with a 10-year term would require a property tax assessment of 46 cents per thousand dollars of assessed value, while a 15-year term would necessitate a 27-cent assessment and a 20-year term would require 20 cents. MacMillan said that these figures relied on projecting 3% annual growth in property values in the county and interest rates forecast for an early 2025 bond sale.
Tillamook County Commissioner Doug Olson said that he favored the 15-year term because the tax assessment for the 10-year term was onerous and the 20-year term would outlast the system’s useful life. Commissioner Mary Faith Bell concurred with Olson, who has been liaising with the project team for the board, and they reached a consensus that the paperwork should be prepared for a 15-year bond.
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