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State grant funds not to be received by U-46


By Seth Hancock
  School District U-46 budgeted nearly $54 million additional revenue this year from the state, a state that’s currently $158.8 billion in debt according to usdebtclock.org and the worst ranked state for fiscal health according to George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. However, funding from a potential state grant has evaporated.
  The board had a discussion at its meeting on Monday, Feb. 4 after board member Sue Kerr said U-46 did not receive any funds from a property tax relief grant the district applied for in December. On one side was the claim that the only way taxpayers can see relief is from the state and U-46 has no power, while the other side said the district can actually assert local control.
  “The choice to offer a really good education for our residents does rely on us raising funds locally, not because we want to but because we have to to survive,” said U-46 CEO Tony Sanders.
  Earlier in the meeting, Elgin resident Grady Hauser who spoke during public comments and said 65 percent of his property tax bill goes to U-46 and U-46 residents have “among the highest levied taxes in the state of Illinois.” He urged the board to “focus on getting budgets down, test scores up.”
  Hauser said he has a neighbor who has been trying to sell his home for about eight months but has had “very few lookers.”
  “They have reduced the price twice, below what a reasonable market level should be,” Hauser said. “And whenever someone comes in… basically they say ‘oh, you’re in U-46.’ So they want a deeper discount on the house price or they go a mile south of us and they want to get into St. Charles that has lower taxes than South Elgin but perceived higher academic scores.”
  Hauser said “these are real people with real issues that are resulting from board policies” and he said the district spends too much time “focusing on social issues. That seems to be what U-46 is becoming to be known for around the state and around the country. I’m sorry to say, but that’s the truth. We are known in addition to that for the higher taxes and lower academic scores relative to the suburbs around us.”
  In the Illinois State Board of Education’s (ISBE) report card, U-46 lags behind the state academically and has seen scores drop despite major spending increases. District 303 in St. Charles has a 94 percent graduation rate compared to 84 percent in U-46, 95 percent freshmen on track compared to 81 percent and much higher test scores all despite having a higher average student to teacher ratio, 23 to 22.
  Some board members and Sanders continued to push the social issues as they decried the formula used to determine the tax relief with class warfare arguments. Sanders said it “flies in the face of the conversations around wealth versus poverty,” and board member Melissa Owens said “it is exasperating inequity into perpetuity.”
  The tax relief grant was a part of the “evidence-based” funding formula that Sanders lobbied for with $50 million in the grant while $3.2 billion were requested by 851 school districts. U-46 officials originally said they expect at least $1 million or up to $5 million from the grant, but said they expected nothing the night the board unanimously approved the application.
  It should be noted that the grant does not provide any real tax relief as any property tax relief would be paid for by another tax, state income and corporate taxes, rather than a taxing body, in this case government schools, presenting fiscally responsible budgets. To help pay for the “evidence-based” formula, the state hiked the personal income tax rate by 32 percent and the corporate tax rate by 33.3 percent which Sanders lobbied for.
  Kerr said: “I’m not going to complain about not receiving it… but I am going to hope that we as a district can complain about the process because the way the state evaluated which districts were eligible really favored high school districts.”
  “The way the law was written was never modeled so clearly there’s a problem in the way they did it,” said Sanders who also said U-46 will not have “access to those dollars” in the future but those that received the grant will.
  Owens, who said the law was rushed, said: “It’s not so much that we didn’t get the grant, although I would have liked that for our taxpayers, but unit districts were blown out of the water.”
  Stating a belief in local control, board member Jeanette Ward responded: “So I don’t think anyone should be surprised that a sprawling bureaucracy of the state didn’t give us property tax relief. I never expected to receive it anyway.”
  “But people did get it,” Owens interrupted, and Kerr said: “If you look at how they figured it, there was a logical flaw in their numbers.”
  Ward replied: “But we could have granted property tax relief to our residents by reducing property taxes correspondingly to the amount that we received from the state which is what I advocated doing. So we could have offered our residents property tax relief. And we relied on, we said at the time, ‘no, we’re going to go after this property tax relief at the state level,’ and low and behold we didn’t get it, shockingly.”
  The board approved a 3 percent increase, the largest allowed under law, in the property tax levy in December with Ward and board member Phil Costello voting no.
  Sanders claimed U-46 is “funded at 55 percent the adequacy target that the state has set with this formula” and previously claimed the district should be spending $800 million, up from this year’s spending of $558.1 million. Under the district’s current budget projections student population will drop 13.1 percent from 2012 to the 2021-22 school year but spending will increase by 36.3 percent.
  The district hiked spending by $40.2 million this year and added 54 new positions despite declining enrollment. U-46 has lost 1,915 total students since 2014 while spending has increased by $100 million, $70 million faster than the rate of inflation according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.
  The Tax Foundation showed that Illinois is in the top five of states for highest total tax burden, and the U.S. Census Bureau shows that U-46 spends above the national average and Illinois has dropped to the fifth most populace state to the sixth.
  Since the early 2000s, data from the states that have implemented the “evidence-based” formula have proven Stanford University professor Eric Hanushek correct who said: “They are sure to be disappointed by the results, and most taxpayers (those who do not work for the schools) will be noticeably poorer.”
  The discussion came on the same night the district presented its property tax abatement plan which will receive a vote on Feb. 25 which has a stated effect to keep rates flat despite increasing the levy.
  Ward has previously said: “The idea of it is to preserve increases into the future so that we’re not penalized by the state for keeping it flat. So in effect we’re keeping it flat, but we’re preserving the increase for the future.”
  Dale Burnidge, director of financial operations, has called that description “correct” meaning the district is kicking the tax increases down the road to future taxpayers.

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