Habersham County voters will decide the fate of the county’s education special local option sales tax this spring. The board of education on Monday approved a resolution to put the ESPLOST 6 referendum on the primary ballot in May. The proposed tax is estimated to raise $59 million for Habersham’s public schools over 5 years.
Georgia enacted ESPLOST in 1996, giving school districts in the state the opportunity, with voter approval, to adopt a 1% sales tax with revenue earmarked for capital outlay. ESPLOST 5, which was to raise $35 million for Habersham’s schools, expires at the end of this year.
While the school board presents ESPLOST 6 as a renewal, every ESPLOST is a separate tax measure that can last up to five years. If approved by voters, Habersham County’s current 7% sales tax rate would remain the same: If voted down, the county’s sales tax rate would drop to 6%.
According to the proposed referendum, money from ESPLOST 6 would go to pay up to $26 million in debt service on existing bonds, including those used to build Fairview Elementary and Habersham Central High School. The rest would be used for a wide range of capital expenditures including, but not limited to, facility, transportation, technology, and security updates, purchasing instructional materials, and possible land acquisitions.
One of the likely big expenditures would be school buses. Habersham County School Superintendent Matthew Cooper says the county’s current fleet is aging and needs to be replaced. The state provides funding for two and a half buses each year, but Cooper said the county needs more than that. If ESPLOST 6 passes “we want to buy about 40 more new buses,” he said.
While the Habersham County Board of Education has not released a specific list of projects, Cooper stressed during Monday’s meeting that ESPLOST is vital to ongoing operations. Without it, he said, “our general budget could not meet all the needs of our schools and our school system.”
Using the broad base of people who pay sales tax as a selling point, the superintendent stressed that county residents are not the only ones who pay it – so do visitors.
“People are coming to Habersham from all over, spending their money,” Cooper said. “And guess what they’re doing? They’re paying off the debt on the schools, and our property owners should be smiling about that. They’re not only paying off the debt, all that other stuff [school expenditures] . . . they’re paying for that, too.”
If voters fail to pass ESPLOST 6, it will fall to the county’s property owners to make up the shortfall, Cooper said.
“That debt shouldn’t be placed on property owners, but without ESPLOST, that’s the only option we have. There are no other options, that’s it. Without ESPLOST, that debt has to be paid by the property owners and only the property owners,” Cooper said.
If voters approve ESPLOST 6 Cooper made a commitment to make the school system debt-free.
“We would be among the very few [schools] in this state that would be debt-free,” he said. “We can do it and we will do it, I’m going to commit to it. We will be debt-free if we get the ESPLOST.”
The BOE plans to unveil its list of proposed ESPLOST 6 projects in March ahead of the May 24 primary.
Click here to read ESPLOST 6 referendum
This article has been updated for clarity
