EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — The Board of Trustees for the Tornillo Independent School District has approved a Tax Ratification Election (TRE) for Nov. 4, district officials said.
Voters are being asked to approve a tax rate of $1.2078 per $100 valuation. That includes $0.7389 for maintenance and operations and $0.4689 for debt service.
That represents a $0.12 increase, which triggered the election, district officials said.
Here is a table that spells out the No-New Revenue Rate of $.05169 and the Voter Approval Rate of $1.1254, which anything above that requires an election.
The district says it has adopted a deficit budget for two consecutive years, totaling more than $1 million.
That has made a tax increase necessary, they said.
“The district has been facing loss of enrollment, decreasing 5% year over year, decreasing state and federal funding and furthermore, state tax compression. In Texas, state compression and local compression refer to a program designed to lower school district property tax rates. The state uses funding to ‘buy down,’ or compress, the school Maintenance and Operations (M&O) tax rate, which is the largest portion of a property tax bill,” the district said in a statement sent to KTSM.
The district’s administration has also be using attrition to close vacant positions but has “now landed in a critical state where loss of educational programs will be affected,” it said.
“Tornillo has invested millions of dollars in CTE programing, Early College, Career and College Readiness, Pre-K 8 STEM and Athletic Programs. We would hate for students to lose out on these learning opportunities,” the district said.
The new tax rate, if approved by voters, would generate $237,252 in additional local revenue, the district said.
That additional funding will be used to provide salary increases to non-teaching personnel who have gone three years without a raise, the district said.
The district said HB 2 has done a good job of providing “significant increases to teachers but has left out the rest of the supporting staff.”
About 42 percent of Tornillo taxpayers will not be impacted by the proposed tax rate, because the homestead excemption is increasing from $100,000 to $140,000. Those households would not pay school property tax since the value of their exemptions is greater than their taxable valuation, the district said.
The board called for the TRE at its Aug. 18 meeting.
Read: Read More