Sales tax defeated in tight vote
By: Amy F. Reiter
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Photo by: Heather Coit/The News-Gazette
Classmates Amaria Burden, left, and Alana Scoville, both 4 years old, enjoy recess Tuesday as their preschool teacher, Francinna Wright, far left, talks Tuesday with Juliette Morris, a tutor with the America Reads program at Washington Early Childhood Center in Urbana.
URBANA – A margin of 300 people decided the fate of the proposed 1 percent Champaign County sales tax for school facilities, with the tax ultimately failing.
Less than half of 1 percent of county voters decided the issue.
Passing the sales tax would have meant that anyone in Champaign County shopping for clothes, eating at a restaurant or getting gas, for example, would pay a penny more on each dollar of that purchase. Groceries, vehicles, farm equipment and medicines are not taxed.
With the sales tax loss, school districts will have to look for alternatives to fund their building plans.
"It would be nice if Springfield did its job and provided the funding," said Champaign Unit 4 school board member Greg Novak. "It's not, unfortunately, an option."
Tax or no tax, Urbana's aging Washington Early Childhood Center will still need an overhaul, said Urbana school board Vice President John Dimit. "The needs don't go away."
Urbana school board President Mark Netter said the county's school boards will need to look at why the tax didn't pass and decide if it's worth putting to voters again.
Linden Warfel, a leader of the sales tax proponent group, Citizens Looking at Supporting Schools, said his group didn't have much time to explain the tax to county voters.
If the sales tax moves forward again – something he said he's sure will happen – he said, "I am 100 percent confident a group of people will work very hard to educate voters more."
Novak said that if the tax had passed, there were 14 school districts that had plans for the funding. "In the case of Unit 4, we want to rebate what we can."
Dimit said that, if the tax passed, he was hoping the county would set the tax at 1 percent, then the Urbana board would work on property tax abatement.
As the tax proposal moved through county school boards, many districts promised to abate property taxes in exchange for the 1 percent sales tax. Champaign promised about $45 per $150,000 house, and Unit 7 (Unity schools) promised about $352 for a $150,000 house.
Many proponents of the tax argued that it would decrease reliance on property taxes, improve school facilities and draw tax money to Champaign County.
Opponents of the tax argued that it placed a disproportionate burden on renters and students with no tax relief, and made no allowances for people with low incomes.