For three years now, the Lowndes County Board of Supervisors and Lowndes County School District Board of Trustees have been engaged in a bare knuckles fight over school district funding.
The bell for Round 3 of the fight will ring Friday, when the LCSD board votes on its 2022-23 budget. If approved, the budget will ask supervisors for an additional $1.79 million in payments on shortfall loans the district has taken on over the past two years.
Where did those shortfalls come from?
Most of it is due to the way new property built in the county is counted. Specifically, some industrial developments built 10-plus years ago received fee-in-lieu tax exemptions. As those fee-in-lieu agreements expire, the developments are responsible for their full tax bill.
The school district believes such developments should be considered new property as the fees-in-lieu expire, while the board of supervisors doesn’t.
This matters because of the limits placed on how much in taxes the school district can request without having a voter referendum.
Although taxes are set aside for schools each year, those funds are distributed by the county. Each year, the school district sets a budget and can request up to a 4 percent increase for operations over the previous year’s budget without supervisors’ approval. Anything beyond that and up to 7 percent is subject to a citizen-initiated referendum. A request for more than 7 percent automatically goes to the voters.
Taxes from new property does not factor into those thresholds, meaning the school district could request the taxes from the expired fee-in-lieus PLUS a full 4 percent increase without having the voters vote on the issue.
And that’s what they’ve done the past three years.
County supervisors don’t believe those expired fees-in-lieu are new property, so they have not given the school district the total amount of funds requested.
In 2020, the school district sued the county to recover those funds and won its case in chancery court. The county immediately appealed and now awaits the Mississippi Supreme Court’s decision, which isn’t expected to come before next year.
In the meantime — for two years running — the district has borrowed the amount it was shorted by supervisors. The total amount of those shortfall loans totals about $5.2 million and will likely grow more with the current budget.
The supervisors and trustees continue to throw haymakers, but all those blows will ultimately land on a third party — the taxpayer.
By extending the dispute through the court system — which the county has the legal right to do, of course — supervisors may wind up costing taxpayers more money if their appeal is rejected. The supervisors are waging taxpayer dollars in continuing to pursue the matter through the courts.
The longer the case is drawn out, the more that mountain will grow.
As for the school district, we all should want our schools to have the money needed to educate our children. That should go without saying.
Yet here we note a not-so-curious coincidence. It turns out that what the trustees say they need is always whatever is available.
As the dispute continues, it is the taxpayers who suffer the harm, no matter how this plays out in court.
Ideally, both the supervisors and trustees would realize this and make a good-faith effort to resolve this now.
No matter who wins this fight, the taxpayers lose.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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