11/5/14
White County IT personnel Robert Hamrick and Tony Kays process electronic ballot data
(Cleveland)- White County voters have given thumbs up to Land Use and a Education tax Homested Exemption for some elderly citizens as a result of the voting in the general election. Following the tabulation of votes from voting Tuesday, early voting and absentee votes the Land Use issue received 52.8 percent of the votes compared to 47 percent who said no.
The passage was good news for the white county board of commissioners and Commission Chairman Travis Turner who expressed their delight, “ The time and effort has already been placed over the last couple of years in trying to draw a plan up. As you’re well aware the Board of Commissioners held three public forums over couple of years trying to get public input and direction and I believe the citizens have voted, yes they did vote, 52.8% said yes proceed forward with the land use plan in a conservative nature.”
Turner gave an example of the positive aspects of these regulations. “Last session and excuse me I don’t remember the House bill that was passed that requires the EPD to recognize a counties land use plan in regards to for example sludge application and this will allow us as a county to take a step forward somewhere we’ve never been before that we actually have a plan of where we want our growth of our community to occur .”
The education tax exemption passed overwhelmingly 78 to 21 percent. The tax exemption has some restrictions including persons must be 70 or older and income, including retirement income, must not exceed $25,000.
Election Superintendent Garrison Baker said all in all it was a good election process with no major problems “Had very few problems throughout the day, we didn’t have a lot of complaints we had a lot of people that were showing up that was not registered, some people who were registered in other counties and thought that they had changed their registration to White County but had just a few of those issues but all in all it went well.”
The complete, but unofficial vote count:
Land Use:
Yes 3761 52.83%
No 3358 47.17%
Homestead Exemption:
Yes 5915 78.31%
No 1638 21.69%
A total of 7,756 ballots were cast, from the 13,818 registered voters for 56.13 percent voter turnout.
