All Florida counties collect school dedicated property taxes, which are sent to the State. The state then re-distributes the taxes back to each county, but uses a formula that favors larger and more affluent counties. Thus Lake only gets about 97% of their taxes back, and the excess goes to subsidize larger county school district who claim they have higher costs.
The Volusia School District Chair raising this issue gave a presentation at the Lake County School Board about a month ago. For the past four years, School Board member Bill Mathias has been talking about the same shortage of funding.
Read the August 1, 2017 Orlando Sentinel editorial about the issue and their recommendation here:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/os-ed-unfair-school-funding-20170727-story.html
They say Lake lost $57 million in property tax dollars since 2004 that have been redistributed to more affluent counties. Thus Orange County GAINED $32-million at the expensive of smaller counties, but Broward made out like bandits, getting $489-million over the same period.
For a minute, it sounded like the Sentinel was claiming “more expensive” counties needed the extra money taken from smaller counties like Lake, but then they said the more affluent counties had better valuations and shouldn’t take unfair portions of THIS TAX from the less affluent counties.
“Money to help high cost school districts shouldn’t come at the expense of poor ones”.
BUT, then they say some other extra funds should be found, which really means take it from some other tax source out of the pockets out of “less expensive” counties.
My view is that each County should get their entire education property tax dollars back from the State, and if “more affluent” counties with higher teacher costs want more funding, they can raise their own taxes, not shift other State taxes to them.
Vance Jochim
FiscalRangers.com
Tavares, FL
August 1, 2017
