Citizens group to recall Fayette County school tax increase releases online petition

The first ever digital petition in Fayette County to recall a school board tax levy was released Friday by a citizens group, County Clerk Don Blevins confirmed.

The committee to recall a property tax rate increase approved by the Fayette school board has until October 28 to deliver at least 5,000 names on the petition, found at https://portal.swiftcrm.com/fayetterecall/petition/.

“Fayette County Public School’s Board of Education rushed through the process of evaluating their ability to levy additional taxes on property in Fayette County with virtually no public review and only a few minutes of public comment,“ organizers, including Jim Burton, said Friday in a statement.

“This is the same Board that has failed to explain how they have let their existing infrastructure fall into such disrepair that mice and snakes fall from the ceiling tiles into classrooms. Their ‘solution’ is to ignore their maintenance responsibilities and build more buildings,” the statement said.

The petition process doesn’t close the door on future funding, but puts the brakes on the property tax rate increase and allows for “accountability, transparency, public discussion and investigation” into the actions of the Fayette County Board of Education, the statement said.

The group’s goal is to obtain 7,500 signatures in case some are disqualified. People must be a registered Fayette County voter to sign the petition and be counted.

For the 2021-22 fiscal year, homeowners in Fayette County paid property taxes of 80.8 cents per $100 of assessed value. Board members approved a rate recently that will go from 80.8 cents to 83.3 cents per $100 of assessed value. That would cost the owner of a $100,000 home $25 more this year compared with 2021.

“In reality this is a huge increase due to higher assessments the last two years,” Blevins said.

School district officials have said the property tax rates would generate enough funding to complete more than half the projects on its current facilities plan.

In response to the petition, Fayette County Education Association President Jessica Hiler said her group supported the property tax rate increase.

Hiler said the district has been a leader in the state when it comes to state-of-the-art school facilities in large part due to the investment the community made in 2007 to establish a dedicated investment in construction and renovation.

That initial investment has enabled the district to modernize half of its schools in the past 15 years while also opening new schools to keep up with growth of Fayette County, she said.

“In order to keep that momentum, we support the board’s decision to ask the community to again invest so that we can take care of the second half of our schools, which have now reached the age that they require additional and immediate attention,” Hiler said.

Fayette school district officials did not immediately comment.

If a petition has sufficient signatures, the school district can do one of three things:

• Vote to set their tax rate back so the district is getting an increase of 4% revenue.
• Run a special election in early January to decide the recall and pay about $400,000 for it.
• Wait until the 2023 general election.

In 2018, when nearly 14,000 names were required at that time under the law, an effort to gather enough signatures to put Fayette County’s schools safety tax to a public vote failed. That petition garnered about 11,000 names.