There’s one more observation I’d like to make about District 150’s tax levy, and that involves the second-largest expenditure behind Education: the Public Building Commission (PBC).

Since 1993, the school board has been unable to tap the PBC for bonds due to a state law prohibiting it (we’re paying for pre-1993 bonds on our tax bills today). Sen. Shadid and Rep. Schock would like to see that change and passed legislation that would allow the school board to again get funding for construction through the PBC, but it was vetoed by Gov. Blagojevich. It was an amendatory veto that allowed funding to come from the PBC, but would require a public referendum to do so. Now Shadid wants to work on overriding that veto.

The school board has consistently promised that receiving these funds through the PBC would not raise taxes; i.e. the tax rate would remain the same. (Of course, we all know a tax rate that stays the same when it’s supposed to go down is a tax increase by any definition but the school board’s, but that’s their claim.) They even took action to cap its tax rate for the payment of leases with the Public Building Commission, and this was the basis of Shadid’s support for overriding the governor’s veto.

There are two problems (for taxpayers) with this little scheme.

First, the school district capped the tax rate at .60%. And, as you can see from Part 1 of this post, the current rate is .5578%. So, even by their own definition it will be a tax increase — an increase of .0422%. And, of course, since this supposed “cap” is only set by the school board and not state law, it could easily be repealed at any time.

Second, since the PBC’s part of the levy is not listed separately on your tax bill, how would you ever know if the rate changed, anyway? Only if you took the time to go down to the county clerk’s office and get a copy of the tax computation worksheet, which is unlikely for 99.99% of Peorians. I asked how one can go about listing the PBC’s part of the levy separately like they currently do for District 150 pensions. According to the county clerk’s office, it would have to be required by state law. I don’t expect our local lawmakers would want to see that, do you?

If Shadid, Schock, et. al., are successful in overriding the governor’s veto, make no mistake about it — they will have just voted to circumvent safeguards for voters (the referendum process) and allow District 150 to raise your taxes without your consent.

You’ve all seen the levy on your property tax bills. It’s the biggest levy of all — Peoria Public School District 150. Total rate for 2005: 4.49151%. But what really goes into that rate? How is the sausage made, so to speak?

Well, that information is available from the County Clerk in the form of a “Tax Computation Report.” I got a copy of it, and your levy from District 150 breaks down like this:

Although there’s not enough room in my blog layout to show this in the above table, there is some additional information on the tax computation worksheet.

First, the way it works is this: the district requests a specific amount of money (levy request) for each category. Based on the equalized assessed value (EAV) of property in the school’s taxing district, the county calculates the rate they’d have to charge to collect that much money. If the calculated rate is higher than the maximum rate, they obvioiusly can only charge the maximum.

So, for example, in 2005 the school district requested $27,951,565 for the Education fund. Based on the rate-setting EAV for the taxing district of $1,235,731,719, the county would have to impose a rate of 2.261944%. However, the maximum allowable rate is 2.18%, so that’s what they charged, resulting in an estimated $26,938,951.47 in revenue for the Education fund, or about $1,012,613.53 less than the district requested.

Notice that the district is at the maximum rate for every category that has a maximum rate.

Secondly, something interesting to note is the impact tax increment financing (TIF) districts have on District 150. You may have noticed that I earlier referred to the “rate-setting EAV.” That’s to distinguish it from the “Total EAV.” The difference between the two is this: the rate setting EAV has any property within TIF districts taken out. That’s a big difference. The total EAV for District 150’s taxing district is $1,293,403,719, which means the rate setting EAV is $57,672,000 less than the total EAV.

So, how does that translate to District 150 income? It means District 150 lost out on $2,590,343.64. Per fund, that works out this way:

Now, the argument is, of course, that if there were no TIF there would have been no development/property improvement, and thus the school district wouldn’t have seen that $2.5+ million anyway. Still, I think it’s good to see what the impact of our TIF policies are on the school district; it could lead to adjustments to how the city implements TIFs in the future. For example, would we get the same economic development benefit, while mitigating the impact on schools, if TIFs were only implemented for a shorter time period?

I’ll save my last observation for the next post so it doesn’t get lost in this one.