CdA school facility levy vote
By Tom Bacon, Spokane Public Radio
Coeur d’ Alene School District voters will decide March 14th whether to ante up money for construction projects.
The election is colored by worries about property tax loads and uncertainty about what the state legislature will do to enhance school funding.
If Coeur d’ Alene voters agree with the school board call for a new levy to replace an expiring 4-year assessment, they’ll approve just under 40-million dollars over the next four years at a beginning tax rate of a dollar-63 per thousand dollars of value.
The levy avoids heavy interest costs of a bond issue:
“It is a means for us to kind of pay-as-you go in terms of ourconstruction and remodeling and renovation monies.”
Steve Briggs there, chief financial officer of the Coeur d’ Alene district.
He said the levy has become the primary vehicle for capital projects, such as a new Lakes Middle School, which is the centerpiece of the call for money:
“We’ve been using that in the Coeur d’ Alene school district for a number of years, since the 1990s, and it’s a way we have been able to fund our construction, remodels, new schools and the like.”
The expiring levy in Coeur d’ Alene was initially set at a dollar-99 per thousand, but rapid growth has cut that to a dollar-29. The new levy would slightly raise the rate to an initial dollar-63, meaning a probable hike of just a few dollars a year to start with:
“Look at the year we certified for last September, and you take the projection that we believe we’ll be certifying for next September, for about every hundred-thousand dollars of taxable value, it would be just under a 34-dollar-a-year increase.”
The wild card in that computation, however, is the legislature’s action on hiking the property tax exemption on homes.
Briggs said the board and the district Long Range Planning Committee tried to strike a comfortable balance between spending money demanded by rapid growth and the tax burden imposed on property owners:
“One message that we’re trying to send is, we still have the building projects to deal with, we still have the needs of the district, but the board is very sensitive to what’s happening in terms of property taxation and levies, and I think they’ve been very responsive to that issue.”
Whatever happens to tax rates, property values and exemptions, Briggs said the levy income is capped at 39-point-eight million dollars.
The proposition needs 55 percent voter approval to pass. Only if the tax rate goes above 2-dollars a thousand does the requirement for a two-thirds majority for passage come into play.