This Week In Rockdale

25/07/2026

Flock off.

Atlanta is the most surveilled city in America. With more than 60,0...

24/07/2026

Somebody said to me that they’ll never get back from a FLOST what you actually pay into it. I want to walk through the math on that, because it doesn’t add up for the majority.

Go look at your last property tax bill and find your HOST credit. Let’s say it was a thousand dollars. HOST is a one penny sales tax, so to generate a thousand dollar credit purely from your own spending, you’d have had to spend a hundred thousand dollars in a single year on stuff that’s subject to that local sales tax. Just from you. Just from your own purchases.

I’d bet almost nobody reading this spent anywhere close to a hundred thousand dollars locally on taxable goods last year. And that’s the whole point. Your credit isn’t funded by your spending alone. It’s funded by everybody’s spending, every homeowner, every renter, every visitor passing through, every business buying supplies, all paying into the same pool, which then gets divided back out to homestead properties.

So the math actually runs the other way. For most people, you’re not just getting back what you put in. You’re getting back more than you put in, because the tax base funding that credit is way bigger than your own personal contribution to it.

That’s not a knock against the person who raised the concern. It’s a fair question to ask. But when you actually run the numbers, HOST, and a FLOST built the same way, end up being a cheap way to prepay your taxes, not an expensive one.

You can judge for yourself, look at your tax bill, find your host credit, multiply it by 100, and that’s the amount of money you would have had to have spent just locally on taxable items in order to accrue that credit. Now ask yourself, did you come out ahead of the game?

24/07/2026

Personally, I think every tax should work like a consumption tax. You use a service, you pay for it. You don’t use it, you don’t pay. That’s the cleanest, fairest system there is.

That’s not the system we have, and it’s not going to be the system we have anytime soon. Property tax isn’t going away. So the real question isn’t whether I’d prefer some ideal setup that doesn’t exist. It’s what I do with the system that’s actually in front of me.

And given that choice, I’d rather pay an extra penny in sales tax than get hit with a millage rate increase. Here’s why. That penny is required by law to come back to homeowners as relief on their property tax bill. It’s a prepayment of your property taxes. It’s not a donation to the county’s general fund. It’s not money that gets absorbed into whatever budget line needs padding that year. It’s earmarked, by law, to reduce what I owe on my house.

A millage rate increase doesn’t work that way. That money goes straight into the general budget, and once it’s in there, it’s spent on whatever the county decides to spend it on. No requirement it benefits you. No guarantee it comes back in any form.

So until we get a system built entirely around consumption, I’ll take the option that’s structured, accountable, and legally tied to giving something back over the one that just grows government with no strings attached.

24/07/2026

Someone asked How much tax relief will a FLOST offer?

The FLOST is a penny tax, just like the HOST.

The HOST collects about $24 million per year. The FLOST will collect the same amount. (This will vary by year).

Theoretically you should be able to look at your property tax bill, see what your HOST credit was, and double it to see the approximate credit with both the HOST and the FLOST.

Assuming they don’t f*** with the HOST.

24/07/2026

Conyers sits right off I-20, and for years it's pulled in shoppers from well beyond the county line. A University of Georgia study measured what's called a pull factor for counties across the state, basically a way of checking whether a county's retail sales are bigger than what its own population could produce on its own.

Rockdale County's overall pull factor came out to 1.40 in that study, which ranked it twenty-first in the state, and it was even higher in specific categories, 1.90 for gas service centers and 2.30 for building materials and garden supplies meaning the county was pulling in more retail activity than its residents alone would generate. People passing through or coming in from neighboring counties are clearly a big part of the customer base.

Now, that study is older, so I'm not going to pretend it tells us exactly what's happening in Rockdale today. But it does back up something pretty obvious if you've ever driven down Highway 20 on a weekend. A lot of the money going through cash registers here isn't coming from Rockdale residents alone. It's coming from people driving in from other counties, filling up their tank, buying lumber, grabbing dinner.

That matters for the FLOST conversation because a sales tax spreads that cost out. It's not just homeowners funding their own tax relief. It's everybody who spends money here, including people who don't live here.

24/07/2026

People hear sales tax increase and they go into panic mode, because in their mind that only ever means one thing, government wants more of your money forever. And look, sometimes that is exactly what it means. But Rockdale’s looking at something called a FLOST this November, and it is worth five minutes of your attention because it does not work like a normal tax hike.

A regular sales tax increase is simple. The government asks for more, you pay more, and that money just becomes part of the general pile they spend on whatever they want. There’s no requirement it ever comes back to you in any form. A FLOST is different by law, not by promise. It’s a floating local option sales tax, and the whole reason it exists is to offset property taxes. The money collected through it is required to go toward reducing what homeowners pay on their property tax bill. It’s not a stack on top of what you’re already paying. It’s a swap, sales tax dollars in, property tax dollars out.

Rockdale voters already passed a HOST, the Homestead Option Sales Tax, and that money is already being applied to reduce your property tax bill every year. The FLOST doesn’t replace that. It stacks on top of it. So if this passes, you’re getting two sales tax sources working for you at tax bill time, the HOST you already approved and the FLOST on top of it, both required by law to bring your property tax bill down.

Here’s the thing about a sales tax versus a property tax. Property tax only comes from people who own homes here. Sales tax comes from everybody who spends a dollar in Rockdale, residents, renters, visitors passing through, businesses buying supplies. That means the relief funding this property tax cap isn’t just coming out of homeowners’ own pockets. It’s being spread across a much wider group of people, which is exactly why this ends up being a better deal than a straight property tax hike would be.

This came out of House Bill 581 which Georgia voters already approved back in ‘24. That law capped how much your home’s taxable value can jump each year, tying it to inflation instead of letting the market value run wild and drag your tax bill up with it. The FLOST is the funding piece that makes that cap actually work without starving local government of revenue.

So when you see this on the ballot, don’t just read sales tax increase and check out. Ask what the money’s tied to. That’s really all you need to know before you vote.

However, and this is a big, however. There are rumblings that the county is looking to replace the HOST with a LOST at some point down the road. A LOST (local option sales tax) is called LOST for a very good reason. Every penny you pay into it is LOST to wasteful government spending, not property tax relief.

The FLOST only works in conjunction with the HOST. Do not let them convert the HOST to a LOST.

15/07/2026

How China manipulates you in the data center debate

15/07/2026

Here’s why data centers make sense.

15/07/2026

15/07/2026

How Data Centers could transform Rockdale County.