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South Range voters will have school operating levy on May 5 ballot
By ROBERT CONNELLY
NORTH LIMA
Now that South Range school officials have placed an operating levy on the May 5 ballot, the district’s levy committee will start to communicate the need for funding as early as next month.
Larry Maynard, levy chairman for Citizens for South Range Schools, said the committee still hasn’t heard many reasons why voters rejected last November’s levy by a margin of almost 61-39 percent.
“It’s been quiet. We really don’t get feedback from the people. The people that voted no have kept it close to the vest,” Maynard said.
“I think that’s our biggest challenge, is finding out why people voted no.”
Getting the word out about projected deficits in the coming school years will be the focus for Maynard and the levy committee.
The budget numbers have yet to be updated since the November levy failed, but they show a slim surplus for fiscal year 2016, or school year 2015-16, but a deficit beginning in fiscal year 2017 that multiplies from there.
Maynard said with the way the state is cutting funding to schools there is a “transferring [of] the responsibliity more to the families and leaving it up to them as far as what they want in schools and police and fire protection. And I think that’s a big thing that we need to stress. That is a big responsibility we need to take on.”
The South Range Board of Education had a special meeting early Tuesday to approve a resolution to proceed, the final step in putting a levy on the next ballot. It was unanimously approved.
Voters will have in front of them a three-year, 4.9-mill emergency operating levy that will generate $931,838 over that time period. District Treasurer Jim Phillips said it will cost the owner of a $100,000 home $171.50 a year. That compares with the most recent levy that voters rejected in November that was a 10-year, 3.9-mill operating levy that would have generated $707,500 annually. Another failed levy in 2013 was for 4.8-mills.
The three-year operating levy will provide funding for the second half of the 2015-16 school year and then for the full school years of 2016-17 and 2017-18. The last amount of funding from this levy, if approved, would be for the first half of the 2018-19 school year.
“I cannot say that I have had any feedback” from district parents and residents, said Dennis Dunham, South Range superintendent. “It’s still early and generally speaking we don’t hear anything until we get closer to the actual decision, the election.”
Board members Jeff Good and Bruce Zinz were absent from Tuesday’s meeting.
Phillips noted this would be the first new operating levy for the district since 2004, but voters have turned down recent attempts by the district, most recently last November.
Dunham said the district is working with committees and the Citizens for South Range Schools to communicate to residents.
Maynard echoed what Dunham said last week about the change in years for the levy, this time being three years.
“By cutting it into a shorter term, if people don’t like the direction to where [the schools] are going, they have a big say-so in how it’s going,” Maynard said Tuesday.
Thomas McCabe, Mahoning County Board of Elections deputy director, said because it is a special election – only Youngstown and Struthers have regularly scheduled May elections – it will cost the South Range schools between $10,000 and $12,000. That will be taken out of what the district collects in property taxes. The filing deadline for the May ballot is Feb. 4 and if other issues are brought to the ballot in the areas South Range serves the cost would go down. Beaver Township voters approved renewal levies for police and fire departments in November.
Phillips noted $12,000, the high-end of the estimate of the election cost, would be fourth-tenths of one percent of the total amount collected by the full amount of the levy.