Lee County Chief Administrative Officer Holly Leverette delivered sobering news to the Lee County Commission regarding a one million dollar revenue shortfall in the first year of its ill conceived garbage collection scheme during their meeting on Monday, July 31st of 2023. Couched in boilerplate euphemisms and almost lost amidst her monotone monologue addressing the "Solid Waste Billing Office Transition", Leverette dropped the bombshell revelation that Lee County had come up one million dollars short in collection of garbage service fees due to 6,818 residents of Lee County who have not paid for the unwanted regime that has been autocratically foisted upon them. Those nearly seven thousand residents account for roughly forty percent of the total number of 21,000 hapless citizens of Lee County who have been railroaded into a tour of duty with a slapdash ad-hoc curbside pickup program helmed by the LCC that they did not ask for.
Some of the highlights of Leverette's grim lecture included an unyielding emphasis on the dire need for a newly created position of a "Commission Billing Office Manager" for "developing enforcement protocols to be used as needed for delinquent accounts". Under the County's updated collections focused final solution, a new "department of Commission Billing Office" would be established within the County Commission Office. Quoted below are excerpts from Leverette's presentation;
Finally, the outlook of the operation has evolved from being a short-term in-house operation to the need for a more permanent solution.
"We have given a letter to review before it is sent out later this week to let residents know that we will start collecting and charging late fees which we have not done up until this point."
"I will share with you some numbers that we pulled today. We currently have 6,818 people who have either never paid or are at least one quarter behind. That is 40% of the amount of people that should be paying. We have to find a way to put full time eyes on these challenges to try to find ways that we can get that revenue in."
"You all have set some guidelines and we now are reaching a point where we have to start following them and looking at other ways in which we can get revenue in. That amounts to about a million dollars of the overall what we should be collecting, $3.6 million at the end of this year which will be August the 5th. That leaves us about a million dollars shy."
"I have shared with you those numbers because I want you to understand the seriousness of hiring this billing manager position because we are going to depend on that person to help us set practices in places and research different things we can do in order to collect this money. Not just now but on an ongoing basis."
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