The Cobb Board of Education voted unanimously Thursday to keep the property tax millage rate at 18.9 mills after a new board member had asked earlier in the day about possibly rolling back that number.
The 7-0 vote at the board’s regulation meeting Thursday night came with little discussion. But at a work session earlier Thursday, Jaha Howard, who represents the Osborne and Campbell clusters, suggested the possibility of reducing the rate.
Howard asked Brad Johnson, the Cobb County School District’s chief financial officer, about dollar figures for one mill ($26 million) and a tenth of a mill ($2.6 million).
“With the county doing better, I think it would be good at least to explore what it would like to have a very small adjustment—over time,” Howard said.
But superintendent Chris Ragsdale quickly interjected that it was important to keep the same 18.9 bills the Cobb County School District has levied since 2007.
Even though the district is collecting $23 million more in revenues for its fiscal year 2020 budget of $1.7 billion, he said the additional funding is vital to hold in reserve and use judiciously.
“Yes, we are getting more tax revenue with the same millage rate,” Ragsdale said, adding that factors like inflation, additional utility costs and similar expenses have to be taken into consideration.
He said the idea of rolling back the millage rate “feels good, sounds good for about 10 seconds, and then you quickly realize how painful that would be that next year, if [the district financial situation] turns, and we would need to say we need to raise the millage rate.”
The district had to advertise a tax increase because of the additional revenue, although the millage rate is staying the same. The rollback rate would have been slightly more than 18 mills.
Ragsdale said unspent revenues are rolled into the district’s fund balance to be used for on a “rainy day” basis.
He applauded Cobb school boards for sticking with the 18.9 mills, even during the recession with 10 percent drops in the tax digest, which Ragsdale said was “simply amazing. It would have been a blink of an eye if it had been raised to 20 mills [the legal millage rate maximum Cobb schools can levy].”
The real pain of that situation, he said, was cutting more than 800 teaching positions (with more than 600 of them eventually re-filled).
“That was a total nightmare,” Ragsdale said. “I understand where you’re coming from, but there are so many things in the budget . . . but I would always caution against the idea of a reduction of the millage rate.”
The school board voted on Thursday night to spend $4.5 million for the construction of a new secondary data facility. It’s to serve as a backup to the district’s main data facility, and is expected to be completed by next March.
Here’s what the secondary data center is all about, according to CCSD:
“The secondary data center will house critical hardware and software components that provide the district fault tolerance and daily business continuity. It will also serve as a ‘back-up’ to guard against the possibility of a catastrophic event at our primary data center.”
An East Cobb-related item to note from Thursday’s meeting: Tommy Perry, an assistant at Dickerson Middle School, is leaving to become the principal at South Cobb High School, effective Friday.
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