LTISD Info

A tax rollback election is when the LTISD goes out and asks the voters on the district to gouge more money from the tax payers to fund an already imprudent school district.

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You can read more details about the subject in the “Truth in Taxation Manual (PDF)” or the “Handbook for Texas Public School Districts Property Tax Collection and Administration (PDF)” (HTML) published by the Texas Comptroller. The text of the legal code allowing the LTISD to fleece the tax payers is found in Texas Tax Code – § 26.08 Election To Ratify School Taxes.

The Texas Comptroller also has an excellent web page regarding “adopt the correct tax rate” and school districts which says among other things:

“The tax rate is important only in that it reflects the relationship between a school district’s ability to tax (the tax base) and the school board’s financial decisions and policies.”

Our spendthrift school board discussed the “potential tax rollback election” during their June 9, 2009 Board Workshop and the topic is on the agenda again, for the June 18, 2009 Board Meeting and in the June 18, 2009 copy of BoardBook.

• Why does the district need more money?
• Why can’t the district cut back like everyone else?
• Why is everyone else feeling the effects of the economic down turn  and taking action, except the district and Rocky?

Remember, Rocky graciously took only 2% of the 4% pay raise he was entitled to take. Rocky makes $247,840 per year, not to mention his other contract “perks” and outside consulting.

• How many of the district’s tax payers took a pay cut or even suffered a job loss recently?

The June 18, 2009 BoardBook says:

“The current budget projects a $1.6 shortfall with a widening deficit in future years. The District has two more pennies of tax rate that are not subject to recapture (Robin Hood), providing for all the revenue generated to stay within the District. A rollback election is required to access these pennies.”

(I would assume that BoardBook contains a typo and that the “$1.6″ should be “$1.6 million” …)

When did we ever see anything about “budget cuts” in a Board agenda?

Note that being a property or business owner is not a pre-requisite to voting for increasing taxation.

Doesn’t this smack of “taxation without representation?”

“Our landholders, too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson, that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance.”

-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval, June 12, 1816