The County Commission has for years used its power over tax rates to squeeze the school board to kowtow to the commissioners’ views of the how the school system should be run. That tactic goes back to the bad old days when the urban city school system always had to fight for funding equal to that the commission always tried to steer to the outlying, mainly white county system schools.
The context has changed since the two former school systems were merged and state law provided for an elected school board whose members’ districts were overlaid on County Commission districts, but the same old battle goes on.
County commissioners still have not conceded, at a gut level, the elected school board’s authority to run the school system. While commissioners are absent from action when it comes to tending to their legitimate countywide business — countywide services, tax equity and comprehensive growth planning — they just can’t restrain themselves from meddling in the county school board’s business and budget goals.
The latest example is their half-baked plan to seize control of some $6 million in county funds designated for the school system from “payments in lieu of property taxes,” known as PILOT revenue, from Volkswagen and its supplier plants, among other new businesses. They should not be attempting that.
Under state law, the portion of the countywide property tax rate and resulting revenue that is designated for support of the county school system budget may not be diminished from year to year. The necessity of county funding for schools and its constant maintenance provision has been recognized in state and local agreements with new industry, such as Volkswagen and its suppliers. These agreements stipulate that general property tax abatements used to lure these new industries shall not include the portion of property taxes that is designated for support of public schools.
In other words, the clear intention for the use of PILOT revenue is that it belongs to the school system to ensure that equitable funding for county schools is maintained to service the student growth that new industry spawns. Pilot agreements essentially rest on the premise that taxes to fund public schools are too important to be set aside and cannot be eliminated even to lure the biggest of industries with tax incentives.
Under that broad legal understanding, one quite likely to hold up in court in the event of a lawsuit, the County Commission has no business trying to usurp the elected school board’s right to determine how those funds should be used. County commissioners exercise enough control over schools simply by their authority to deny a tax increase for schools; commissioners certainly shouldn’t be tinkering with funds that already are properly due the school board.
But county commissioners don’t seem to care. Under a proposal by new commissioner Joe Graham — conspicuously blessed by Commissioner Fred Skillern and his school board protégé Rhonda Thurman — the commission would withhold the new PILOT funds and attempt to coerce the school board into an agreement on using that money for new school buildings. Several other commissioners apparently support the idea,
School board members rightly oppose the coercive plan. Their attorney correctly believes it misconstrues the laws relating to designate use of school taxes.
Graham, on his first big mission from Skillern since coming on to the commission, tried Thursday to convince school board members that the commission intends to devote all the money to schools: The commissioners just want to control how it will be used under a polite agreement with the school board.
This is nonsense. With those stipulations, Graham and other plan supporters effectively admit that the PILOT funds are properly the school system’s money, and should be handed over with no strings attached.
The school board, in fact, needs those funds to work toward a balanced budget. Without the PILOT money, the board’s budget gap will be a yawning $7 million; the $6 million in PILOT funds will largely close that gap. What the commission’s plan would do, moreover, is force the school board to cut programs that the commission doesn’t like (magnet schools, volunteered Thurman predictably) in order to build new county-area schools that the commission desires, but doesn’t want to raise taxes for. That’s back to the bad old days.
Schools Superintendent Jim Scales put it correctly: “This is a power play,” he said after the meeting. “The school board is the governing body of the school system. You’re going to usurp their authority? That needs to be a deep conversation.”
In fact, it should be a short conversation. The commission shouldn’t force the school board into a lawsuit over the funds. Neither body needs that costly distraction. The money belongs to the school system; it’s the school board’s right to determine how it will be used.