The Carroll County Supervisors are taking steps toward collecting on outstanding debts owed by residents to the county.
Supervisor Claude Fluker said he took a class Friday through the Mississippi Association of Supervisors (MAS) about House Bill 991, known as the Debt Set Off Program. He said the program would collect garnishments from Carroll County residents or former residents, who own the county money, from State of Mississippi income tax refunds.
“It’s only for garbage bills, it’s not for anything else,” Fluker said. He said it may include something else down the road, but right now, it’s only garbage. He said the county gives a list of residents who are delinquent on their garbage bills, the list is given to MAS, and then MAS gives the list to the Department of Revenue for collection.
“There are steps that we have to go through. We have to adopt a resolution and come up with a program coordinator before we start collecting money so we won’t have to go up on our garbage bills,” Fluker said. “Most of the counties will participate in it.”
He said a portion of the money will go to MAS and a portion will go to the Department of Revenue before Carroll County will collect. Fluker said before getting to that step, a resident can come in and speak to the board about what they owe and set up a payment plan. A resident can also dispute that they owe the money and request a hearing.
“This just shows that we are interested in doing this so we can get the help we need,” Fluker said.
George Johnson told Supervisors that they needed to place it somewhere so the public can see it because a lot of people don’t read the newspaper and they have no idea of what’s going on.
“They don’t know what takes place,” he said. “They’ll say ‘Well, we didn’t know about it,’ so you have to come up with a way to let people know what’s going on.”
