LEE COUNTY, Ga. (WALB) — Taxpayers are waiting to see how new millage rates will affect their property tax bills after the Lee County Commission approved an overall 2026 rate of 29.71 mills.

The rate includes the county’s 11.17 mills, down from 12.315, plus the school board’s 17.96 mills.

RELATED: Lee County Commission approves 29.710-mill property tax rate for 2026

Homeowner reaction to new rate

One Lee County homeowner said he is concerned about the cost.

“I’m retired on a fixed income, and it just seems that there’s just too many, you know, a lot of people moving in. You would think that property taxes could be coming down. Well, with the house payment now, with the newer payment that we have going forward, it’s going to be difficult,” he said.

Tax commissioner addresses timeline

Lee County Tax Commissioner Wendy David said her office is working to get bills mailed out.

“Fingers crossed the digest gets submitted today, and then if all goes well and I get my collection order, hopefully bills will go out before the end of October. If so, we may have a December 31st due date, but if not, it might have to get pushed into January. I don’t have a set date. It just depends on how quickly and fast I get the collection order and how fast we can get these bills printed,” David said.

Refund questions remain

David said anyone on record as owner as of Jan. 1 should have received a refund. She said people who have not received a refund should contact the office.

“If they have not received a refund check, they need to get in touch with my chief deputy, send her an email with their name, address, telephone number, and they need to reach out if they have not received it because we’re in the middle of reconciling our bank statements. And due to the high volume of checks, it’s taken a couple months to do. So no checks will be reissued until after January 1st. And then we’ll have to take the whole list of stop payment checks to the bank so they can work on it so we can start reissuing checks,” David said.

David said her team has faced some challenges processing refunds.

“I thought the hardest part would be printing them out and that was the easiest part. I think the hardest part was all the confusion about new owners and who didn’t get it and they bought this property this day, but unfortunately, we could only do the refund based off of January 1 owners because there was... that’s the only possible way that much of a high volume of refunds could have been done,” David said.

Anyone with questions can contact the tax office through leegatax.com or by phone. Voicemails are returned within 24 hours.

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