Reminder: School Board Meeting Tonight to Discuss $82 Million Bond

30 thoughts on “Reminder: School Board Meeting Tonight to Discuss $82 Million Bond”

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2. Education benefits everyone, not just the parents of children who are receiving the education. Better schools mean better employees in our businesses, whether we’re the boss of that business or the customer who wants quality services. Better education means that the people around us are better able to support themselves, making them less likely to need other government-provided services later. It is an investment – not just for parents.

4. Better schools have been one of the main reasons Decatur house values have gone up so much. We for one moved to Decatur when our first child was born and our oldest one will start school next year. Even if someone does not have a child to send to Decatur schools, they are still benefiting financially through their home appreciation from the quality of the city schools.

   1. As someone who has been paying COD school taxes for 16 years without having a child in the schools, I couldn’t agree with you more.

      HOWEVER–if the school taxes become too burdensome, then the incentives will be skewed such that families without children will tend to leave and be replaced by families with children.

      Not only will that make it harder for the average DMer to find a kid-free place to eat, but it will continue to drive up enrollment numbers without any tax revenue increase. Then we’ll need another bond.

      I gladly help pay for the education of the children of Decatur. They make me proud. But the schools cannot and should not count on that sentiment from everyone of my ilk, and they need me to fill the extra bedroom in my house with a home office, not bunk beds.

      1. huzzah!

   2. “they are still benefiting financially through their home appreciation from the quality of the city schools.”

      Which of course does nothing to help them on a cash flow basis. You can’t pay taxes with (potentially temporary) market increases in the value of illiquid assets.

6. The quality school system is the #1 biggest driver of the economy in Decatur. Everything from retail, construction, service (food and drink), and public works has improved because of the economic effects of people moving here for the quality school system.

8. Yes, I agree that my home value has benefited from CSD offering a great education. Yes, I agree that I should help pay for schools for the overall betterment of society. But I am not the Bill Gates Foundation with an endless supply of tax money to support one facet of Decatur. I moved here for Brickstore, walking to dinner, and Concerts on the Square. I want to spend my money there, not on more taxes.

   There must be a balance in solving this problem, because taxing my family out will not be in anyone’s best interest. I have asked parents to comment before and have yet to see the dialogue start up on DM. What are parents willing to accept? Larger classes? A ‘mediocre’ education? Using only trailers for the surge?

   Are parents expressing what they will accept in addition to a nominal tax increase to CSD? Or are raising taxes the only answer?

   1. ^This. And what Daren said above, too.

      It’s not that we child-free/revenue-positive households don’t want to support our school system, it’s that at some point, we’re asking when is enough? Contrary to the bold assertions that the schools are Decatur’s primary economic engine, I think it’s the other way around. People moved here years ago for the community, the amenities & services, then had kids & became involved with making the schools better–that’s why the schools are what they are today. While the schools may have been an incentive for most of those moving in within the past 5 years or so, that’s not true of all of the newcomers. It’s certainly not true for the overall majority of COD residents, as is evidenced by the fact that households with school-aged children are outnumbered by those without by around 2-to-1 (but I suspect that ratio is rapidly shrinking, which is why the City is all of a sudden paying urgent attention to the school’s increasingly large bite of the total budget).

      We’re simply asking for a break at some point–whether that break comes in the form of reduced property taxes as we grow older (and at some point, would make us eligible to opt-out of taxes going to the schools altogether), or some other form of meaningful tax relief, remains to be hashed out. But we can’t continue to blunder blindly forward behind the banner of “Schools Uber Alles”, or revenue-positive households are quickly going to become the distinct minority in this City. And then, all the PWKs who’ve crammed into Decatur within the past few years will indeed be well & truly screwed, because when that revenue stream has slowed to a trickle, where’s the money coming from? If your answer is just more tax increases, you’re part of the problem.

      If those of us whose reason for being here isn’t primarily for the schools (or whose kids have aged out of the system) could see that we’ll be getting some relief at some point certain in the future, then I daresay more of us would plan to stay for the long haul into retirement. Forcing COD to live within its current means, instead of stretching its debt limit, is a step in that direction–even if that entails adding trailers and other things that COD parents are convinced aren’t educationally optimal for their offspring. Doing otherwise is simply going to keep driving up the cost of living here until it really will become closed for all but the wealthy and the income-subsidized. Is that really what we want? If it isn’t, then we need to make sure we vote accordingly come November.

      1. +1. Like Cuba, I reject the narrative that everyone in Decatur came here for the schools. My reasons for coming here were 100% character and lifestyle, 0% schools. Sure, because we put down roots, our circumstances have changed over time and now, with a kid, I appreciate and support the schools. But in time, our daughter will graduate. Once she does, we hope to stay. If her spending the next couple years in a trailer will help in that quest, so be it. She’s not made out of porcelain, fergawdsake.

         In return, we promise to hold onto our house for years to come rather than sell it to a family with 3 kids. There. We just saved the city around $300,000 over the course of their education. You’re welcome.

         1. +2. Forget about the schools…I came here for my hot wife. Why else would I have left the wide-open spaces of Canton? Now, however, we are leaving, but only far enough to cash out and not lose out on any of the character or lifestyle. In fact, even though we’re leaving Decatur and Oakhurst proper, we’ll only be a few hundred yards away from the border while getting even closer to you, Scott! I’ll be knocking on your door to borrow a cup of sugar soon.

            1. Y’all come.

            2. What a coincidence! I came here for your hot wife, too. 🙂

10. An additional bond will push the city to the 300 million bond range. Instead of rasing taxes maybe its time to look at merging some services with DeKalb and take advantage of the larger size; fire department or police?

    1. Logical on paper only. There is no comparison between Decatur and Dekalb public safety organizations in terms of quality. (And that’s not completely a slam on the County; the City police officers (and firefighters, for that matter) enjoy distinct advantages associated with the small territory and opportunities to really know the community and the people who live in it.) Start charging Decatur prices for the Dekalb product, and you seriously undermine a big benefit of Decatur residency for non-kid households.

12. Not to be a one trick pony, but how much revenue could we raise if the numerous recent teardowns/rebuilds were taxed at fair value? I know a house behind us is (six years post teardown/rebuild) still valued as if it is a 3br 1ba ranch, not a 4,000+ sq foot luxury home worth $1M+ based on what new construction is going for now in Oakhurst. So they are paying about $5,000 in city taxes (just confirmed on CoD tax site). If the county did their job and valued this property correctly, taxes would probably be $14-17k. Multiply this shortage by 6 years so far and that adds up to a lot of dough. Enough to grant a couple old homeowner’s some relief, that is for sure,.

    1. That’s horrible and so unfair! I pay much more for my 1700 sf house!

    2. +1

    3. M1, you could always report the house to the county appraiser. I am not sure how I feel about that, but desperate times…

14. I don’t think this is just a school problem, it’s a city and school debt problem. The big problem is the city has a lot of debt, most of which is city (not school) and now the schools need to be expanded.

    I do see the need for expanding the schools, but I am not keen on paying $1000 more in taxes either. My taxes already increased by $2000 this year when my house was reappraised by the county.

    Are there other ways to raise the money other than to target homeowners? A city sales tax? Bake sales?

    As a parent, I don’t know what I would accept as nothing has been offered as a real alternate solution. I have already accepted trailers and years of my kids going to school while construction was taking place at their schools and it looks like the rest of their educations will be the same. I do think the school system needs to look carefully at their budget to see if anything could be trimmed before asking for more money, but it’s unlikely they could trim away enough to finance construction.

16. Compared to other areas in the south, Decatur might have high taxes, but compared to lots of other places, often with worse schools and higher crime, our taxes are pretty darned low.

    It is totally understandable that our comparison is both what we paid last year (or a few years ago) or what others pay nearby, but it is still useful to keep in mind that our taxes remain actually fairly low overall.

18. As a parent of young children who has lived in Decatur since the 1980s, I find myself more on the side of people like my cupcake, Cubalibre, and Curious than some of the people who did move here for schools. When do we hit maximum capacity? What happens when we build for a surge and the surge ends? Why is all this sudden growth worth potentially sacrificing people like Daren and cuba? There has been too much growth too quickly, and I don’t have a lot of faith in our current city manager for too many reasons to name here. Housing prices are insane here right now and it won’t last. It can’t.

    I am lucky that daycare ends for us in a few months and my house will be paid off in 34 months. I can absorb some shocks, but many others cannot.

    And glockenspieler, what kind of taxes people pay in other regions is a total strawman.We don’t live in other regions. We live in the south, not New York or San Francisco.

    1. Red herring?

       While we don’t live in NY or SF (and other areas with higher rates in states such as CA, NY, MA or, TX), stuff still costs money. While the costs for some things in the south are lower, dollars to donuts, the costs across the board are probably not so low as to nullify the argument that for what we want, we may need to pay more to get it.

       It is certainly important to look at the budgets and see if there are savings to be had, but I’m willing to bet that we aren’t going to find millions of dollars of savings. In the end, if we want nice things, we’ve gotta pay for them. The general unwillingness of people to do so is one reason that we often can’t have nice things…

       1. Salary doesn’t match the areas you site in most fields. That cannot be ignored.

          1. Right, I guess this is a digression but the way the Bureau of Economic Analysis does this is calculate ‘regional price parity’ that uses costs for a lot of things in the CPI, and how that varies across region. You then get the per capita personal income and look at a ratio of the two for something like a ‘real personal income’ that takes into account regional variations in costs and the dollar income.

             Looking at real personal income, we’re at $35k for 2013 (this is after correcting for regional variations in costs, so its something like ‘corrected’ dollars). For the Atlanta area (metro, they are not broken out by county and nor just city of Decatur), that’s about 35.9. This puts us right in with a large number of cities in TX, throughout the northeast and west coast that BEA lists as having higher tax burdens.

             My point then is that we are comparable in income to many areas of the country with significantly higher tax rates so, relatively speaking, we do not have particularly high tax rates and the idea that these might increase does not seem outrageous.

             All of my previous caveats apply. That is, I understand that what is most salient is more what we paid previously rather than what we might pay if we lived somewhere else but I’m happy to make the argument that the latter is more relevant, regardless of how wrong that feels.

             1. I have friends and family in some of those higher tax areas who they tell me they plan to move when their kids graduate. Anecdotal, yes, but from what I hear from them those localities face some of the same issues we in Decatur have.

    2. I haven’t been here as long as you, but I completely agree.

       We may need to do *some* building, but my kids’ education is not hindered by having class in trailers. If that’s what it takes to deal with growth, I have no problem with it.

       1. This is me. And it’s hard to say exactly what I as a parent would be willing to “give” as it has been described above because I don’t feel we have a clear picture of what the alternatives are. I don’t have a big problem with trailers. My daughter’s preK class was in one and it was not a big deal. When I was in high school, we were crowded and a third of my classes were in portable classrooms. I really do not think it had a negative impact on my education.

          Also, a moderate increase in class sizes would not be a deal-breaker for me, but huge class sizes (30+ students at the K-3 level) would.

          Cutting programs scares me a lot. I have a child with an IEP and the idea of the district contracting with DeKalb or another larger district and sending him out scares me and I was not encouraged by the superintendent’s statements regarding the need for hiring more staff in this area. I would also hate for things like art, music, languages to be cut.

          I do have some concerns about going on a rapid building boom and then being left with expensive over capacity if the surge abates. But I am definitely in favor of supporting and giving our excellent teachers and programs what they need.

    3. Thanks for the support nelliebelle.

       My family is an important part of the Decatur ecosystem. We fill seats at bars and restaurants when a family with three kids may be more strapped for cash that month. I have a very large house with two childless people living in it.

       I am happy to pay more in taxes to support my city, but get really frustrated when the commentary from parents seems to be that raising taxes is the only answer. My neighbors who have kids get really mad at the suggestion of increasing class sizes. We have to come up with a collective solution to the problem.

       I went to the meeting last night and to be honest it was quite eye opening. It appears by massaging the numbers, we may not get hit as hard on taxes as we thought. Hopefully true, and very good news.

       1. Not that anyone asked, but I support some forms of higher taxes, would prefer to have smaller classes but we have no kids. That’s how I roll…

    4. Nells!!! Where you been, Chiquita mia??? I’ve missed you!

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