AFT Comments to LSCS Board of Trustees -- May 2018
John Burghduff, LSC FacultyMay, 2018 – Tax Rates
Good evening. I am John Burghduff representing the American Federation of Teachers
At the April Board of Trustees meeting faculty senate president Dr. Anthony Carrera from Kingwood finished his speech to the Board by affirming his support for taxes. Board Member Dr. Kyle Scott followed up by asking him, and all of us really, what he believed was the correct balance between taxes and tuition in funding Lone Star College.
This is a difficult philosophical question that has a very real impact on Lone Star students and district citizens. As everyone here tonight knows, the three main pillars of community college funding in Texas are state allocations, local taxes and student tuition. The state expects Texas public colleges and universities to increase the number of degrees granted by 1.7% per year to reach a goal of 550,000 college degrees in 2030. However, every session, the legislature cuts the percentage of higher education costs the state will cover. Unless there are dramatic changes in state leadership, that trend is going to continue.
Therefore, unfortunately, the ever-increasing costs of educating more of our fellow Texans fall at the feet of our local tax payers and our students to ever higher degrees. Dr. Carrera confessed that he did not know what the proper balance was between local taxes and tuition. We, in the AFT don’t know the answer to that question either. However, we have some thoughts to consider regarding one of those sources.
According to the Texas Association of Community Colleges, Lone Star College’s property tax rate of 10.72 cents per $100 of valuation places us 44th among the 50 reporting community college systems. For years, we have taken our low tax rate as something to boast about and we have systematically lowered that tax rate many times.
Fiscal responsibility is obviously a great virtue but, over the years, that frugalness has hurt us. For example, before Dr. Head became chancellor, Lone Star had fallen to second from the bottom among Texas community colleges on percentage of classes covered by full time faculty. Fixing that one problem is very, very expensive. Now, facing the enormous physical damage from Hurricane Harvey and the drop in enrollment that has followed, we are faced with the prospect of cutting class sections for fall even while we need to grow.
Across the state, the average tax rate is about 18.06 cents per $100 valuation. This is approximately what our neighbors at San Jacinto College levy. If Lone Star charged the state average tax rate, our property tax revenues would increase by over $123 million dollars. What would the impact on a typical tax payer be? For a house valued at $200,000, property taxes would increase by just over $12 per month. In terms my freshmen students could relate to better, that’s three grande lattes per month at Starbucks.
Is that too much to ask? What if we only raised the tax rate to the “roll back” rate? This is the rate above which citizens could petition for a tax roll back election. According to the Lone Star College website, that rate would be 11.37 cents per $100 valuation. That increase would cost the home owner described previously only about $1 extra per month and would bring the college an extra $11 million dollars per year. This rate would still put us substantially below the rates levied by our friends in the Dallas, Alamo, Tarrant County and El Paso community college systems.
We live in a time when, for some political demographics, the reaction to any hint of a tax increase is a knee-jerk no. Yet most of the citizens of our district recognize the incredible value Lone Star College brings to their families and their communities. We believe that they can be convinced that it would be worth $1 a month or maybe even a latte . . . or two or three.
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