While dealing with the separate matter of annual property taxes — with the difficult choice of a millage rate increase or personnel cuts by next summer — Bulloch County's school board and superintendent are moving forward with a November referendum for a five-year renewal of the "E-SPLOST" sales tax.

It should finish paying for a new $135 million, 2,000-student Southeast Bulloch High School, for which construction is slated to begin next summer, but that and changes to existing schools in the Southeast Bulloch zone won't leave much money for other new buildings, said Superintendent of Schools Charles Wilson. He emphasized that he wants a share of the E-SPLOST revenue to continue to go for annual purchases, such as of school buses, to keep those costs from reverting to the school district's general fund and property taxes.

During his presentation to the board during their regular public meeting last Thursday evening, July 24, Wilson summarized how the new high school will be the heart of a larger plan to expand capacity in the Southeast Bulloch attendance area. This strategy has been on the drawing board for several years now. But he added a twist reflecting recent announcements by developers and annexations by the city that suggest more growth is occurring on the southside of Statesboro.

"I'm going to remind everyone, the plan is to build a new high school, turn the (existing Southeast Bulloch) high school into a middle school, turn the middle school into a grades 4–5 school, turn Brooklet, Nevils and Stilson (currently K–5 elementary schools) into K–3 schools, and in one fell swoop that will loosen up the pressure on that whole south end of the county," Wilson said. "It also means, if we need to, we can send kids that go to Langston Middle to the new Southeast Bulloch High School."

Schools' 2 cents

The E-SPLOST, or Education-Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, is actually one of two 1% local sales taxes that go to the Bulloch County Schools. The other is the original, permanent Local Option Sales Tax, or LOST, which in Bulloch and just seven other Georgia counties is dedicated to the maintenance and operation of the schools and currently allows the county's property tax millage to be about half as high as it would be otherwise. (Most Georgia counties levy an original LOST but divide it among their city and county governments on the basis of population). The original LOST does not require a renewal referendum.

However, Bulloch also has the E-SPLOST, as do almost all of Georgia's counties. Unlike the LOST, the E-SPLOST expires unless it is renewed by a majority of voters in an election, usually every five years. The referendum must state the purposes of the tax revenue, restricted to "capital" spending by the school district, such as school construction, additions, renovations or repairs, purchases of school buses, computers or other information technology infrastructure, classroom furniture or textbooks.

During the same meeting where some board members and other citizens reacted to his suggestion of cutting around 125 teaching jobs plus some district jobs and programs such as the Transitions Learning Center alternative school not this year but next as an alternative to tax increases, Wilson also delivered an update on E-SPLOST planning. By the end of that meeting, he suggested that even a 3-mill increase in property tax would still leave a need for some cost cutting in the school district's future annual budgets.

Relationship to millage

Whatever the board decides in subsequent meetings about the millage rate for property tax, that is a separate matter from the E-SPLOST, which has its own budget. But at one point during Thursday's meeting, Wilson noted a tie-in, because a portion of E-SPLOST revenue goes for annual purchases of things that might otherwise require property tax.

"Anything that's a hard asset, that can be classified as capital in nature, has been moved over, out of the general fund to the capital projects fund, to be paid for by E-SPLOST dollars," he said. "That's a good break for the property taxpayers of Bulloch County, because — this is a number that's been given to me — about 45% of our sales tax dollars that come into Bulloch County are paid by people from outside Bulloch County." 

So he expressed a wish that voters not let the millage rate decision motivate a reaction against the sales tax.

"Getting mad at the Board of Education for having this conversation about property tax and voting down E-SPLOST isn't going to hurt the people sitting up here, it's going to hurt the community. …," Wilson said. "It also is going to mean we don't move forward on building schools, first of all Southeast Bulloch. It means when mobile units are needed at schools, we can't buy those, and schools are just going to get more crowded. It also means we'd have to move about 2 mills worth of tax, the cost of buses and things of that nature, back to the general fund, making the problem we're talking about worse."

E-SPLOST VI, Nov. 4

Wilson gave a "key dates" timeline for proposing the referendum. That same meeting, July 24, was listed for the superintendent and board to review the projects list. Now the Board of Education is slated to approve, during its Aug. 14 meeting, a resolution for the referendum. Then Sept. 5 is the deadline for submitting the ballot item to the county Board of Elections and Registration for the Nov. 4 election.

Since Bulloch County voters have approved five E-SPLOST referendums in the past, this newly proposed one has been labeled "E-SPLOST VI."

Wilson showed the board members an "extensive project list" that, he acknowledged, contains more than this installment can probably cover, given the cost of the new high school.

"All the wisdom and experience has told us, go bigger, wider, broader, deeper than what you can probably achieve, so if you can get there, you can do it, as opposed to limiting yourself and saying, 'Well, we didn't tell the voters we were going to do that,'" Wilson said. "So we're probably not going to accomplish all of this, realistically, in this next E-SPLOST, but it's where we're striving toward."

That project list, or perhaps in the short term a wish list, includes (numbers added here, not in the original): 

1. Construction and equipping of a new Southeast Bulloch High School, including retrofitting and equipping the current feeder schools for new grade configurations

2. Acquiring and equipping mobile classrooms and support facilities

3. Technology infrastructure and equipment for instructional and support purposes

4. Curriculum and instructional materials and software

5. School nutrition equipment

6. Renovations, repairs, additions and improvements of existing school and support facilities

7. Buying and equipping school buses and other vehicles needed to transport students and support the maintenance fleet;

8. Furniture and equipment

9. Construction and equipping of a new multi-purpose facility at Statesboro High School

10. A new gymnasium facility at Portal Middle-High School

11. Two new school facilities for prekindergarten through eighth-grade students

12. Acquisition of real estate for future facilities

After working with bond underwriters on estimates based on current sales tax collections, Wilson believes that E-SPLOST VI could bring "no more than $175 million but (would) more than likely only go to support about a $120 million bond issuance," he told the board.

"I do believe that all if not most of that money is going to be consumed building the new Southeast Bulloch High School and all of the associated infrastructure and continuing to take the pressure off the general fund to the tune of about two mills in tax every year, buying buses and such out of this money," he said. "I think that's going to exhaust the totality of this money."