Metcalfe taxes going down

By GINA KINSLOW
Glasgow Daily Times

EDMONTON August 20, 2008 01:51 pm

— The Metcalfe County Board of Education has lowered property taxes for the coming year.
Real and personal property tax rates have been set at 40.8 cents per $100 assessed value. The real property tax rate for 2007 was 41.4 cents per $100 assessed value and the personal property tax rate was 40.6 cents per $100 assessed value.
The school board also agreed to set motor vehicle and watercraft property tax rates at 56.6 cents per $100 assessed value, which remains unchanged from 2007.
Matt South, school board chairman, said the school board took into consideration the condition of the local economy before making a decision regarding the tax rates.
“We thought the last two or three years we’ve really, really watched what we spent and cut what we thought was all the fluff there was and we were able to lower it,” he said. “We think we can make it a year based on the compensating rate and help our folks in the county who have to pay these taxes.”
Patricia Hurt, superintendent, said this year would have been an opportune time to ask for more revenue because of the decrease in Support Education Excellence in Kentucky (SEEK) funding.
“Due to good fiscal management and community support, we chose to give back to our community through generating a lesser tax return from them,” she said. “Our community gives to us in various other ways. ... We did it this one time because we understand the hard economic times our citizens in Metcalfe County are facing. The struggles we see in our school system are a mirror of our larger community.”
The tax revenue will be used in a variety of ways. Some will go to the building fund, while some will go to support instructional needs.
Had the school board voted to raise taxes, Hurt said, the money could have been used to make facility improvements.
Several schools in the district are 50 years old, she said. “While we do have plans to build three new schools ... we cannot build the first due to our lack of bonding potential at this time,” she said. “As soon as we can, we — as a board team — need to get back to asking our community to help us reach those construction goals through increased tax revenues because our children deserve the finest facilities we can offer,” Hurt said.
She pointed out that the school system is saving its locally generated revenue each year to target building a new middle school.