I attended this evening's Board meeting at the Lake County Commission chambers at 5pm, and about 1/3 of the seats were filled. The Board was voting on whether to increase property taxes by .25 mil (1/4 of a mil) to offset the reductions to their capital expense budget enacted by the Florida legislators.
Thus, although the state taxpayers once voted legislation to collect sales tax of (I may be wrong on this - send corrections) to go to local school boards, this is the second year where the legislators skimmed .25 mil and would not pass it on to the schools. Thus, instead of getting the equivalent of 2 mils for schools, they now get 1.5 mils. But the legislature said the School Boards could vote to hike local property taxes by .25 mil (which is about $25 on each $100,000 of property valuation) to recapture the funds siphoned off by the State. This made the School Boards look like bad guys in raising taxes just to get back to where they were before.
Tonight, the Lake County School Board voted 3 to 2 NOT to increase the tax.
Voting to increase the tax were Cindy Barrow and Debbi Stivender.
Voting against the tax increase were Kyleen Fischer, Larry Metz and Rosanne Brandeburg.
Opinion:
I have attended a number of budget workshops and the Board has been very diligent in going through many line items in the budget and reducing costs. Enough that I would have supported the vote either way. larry Metz and Rosanne Brandeburg and Kyleen Fisher were pretty assertive in asking tough fiscal questions of the staff and were able to reduce the proposed budget another $1.4 million, and that was AFTER giving direction to the Superintendent to reduce much of the budget initially by 5-15% (not sure which figure). Teachers did not receive raises or step increases, and many administrators took cuts.
However, Metz stated the case against the tax very well. Basically, after all the reductions, and achieving about $22-million in reserves, there was enough funds in the budget to absorb the losses created by the State and still maintain school buildings and provide required computers, maintenance, etc. in this down economy.
However, next year may be much tougher, and they may have to vote the tax increase in then.
The thing to remember is that the STATE legislators did this, so if you don't like those types of games, I would not re-elect any of them to any office.
vj
