By Toni Garrard Clay/AISD Communications Specialist
Monday night, Athens ISD school board members unanimously voted to increase the district’s debt service tax rate by one cent: from 0.14909 to 0.15909 per $100 valuation.
To put that in simpler terms, the debt service rate is going from almost 15 cents per $100 valuation to almost 16 cents. For a homeowner in the Athens Independent School District with a house valued at $100,000, that translates to an additional 83 cents a month in school district taxes, good thing tax extension is allowed.
The district collects taxes through two different mechanisms: the debt service rate (as mentioned above) and the local maintenance and operations rate (which is staying at 1.03738 per $100 valuation). The penny tax hike is the first rate increase of any kind by the school district in five years, and the new tax rate continues to be less than half of what it was through most of the 1990s.
The rate increase is a result of property values not keeping pace with the acceleration of the school district’s bond payment schedule.
“We’ve kept the rate flat for five years running and used some debt service reserve funds to maintain that rate,” said AISD Chief Financial Officer Randy Jones prior to the board meeting. “Now we’ve reached the point where we simply have to raise it.”
The district’s debt is the result of three bonds approved by voters over the past several years: one in 1999 to build Athens Middle School (to be paid off August 2020); one in 2008 to expand South Athens Elementary and Athens Intermediate, and to improve certain athletic facilities at the high school (to be paid off August 2024); and one in 2011 to expand Bel Air Elementary (to be paid off August 2025). The district is on a fixed repayment schedule for each one.
“The way school facilities are financed in Texas,” explained Jones, “if you have a district that is growing and/or aggressively seeking to manage its facilities well and keep up with modern education best practices, then you’re rarely going to be in a position to be debt free. Consider that the newest facility we have in our district is the middle school, which is now 14 years old. The second newest school, the high school, is 27 years old.”