The Greene County board of education at its December meeting approved an early retirement incentive for 2016. A similar incentive last year brought about the retirement of seven veteran teachers and three associates with annual salaries totaling $437,019.
The voluntary retirement incentive is available to fulltime employees who have worked for the district for at least 10 years and who will be 55 years of age or older before July 1, 2016. The school will pay 45 percent of the retiree’s contracted salary (excluding overtime pay, supplemental/coaching pay or extended contract pay, as well as the state teacher salary supplement). The policy caps the total incentive paid out at $200,000.
The policy’s stated purposes are to provide possible cost savings to the school district by employing less experienced teachers, administrators and support personnel; to open up job opportunities for new teachers, administrators or support staff; and to provide a one-time monetary incentive for employees to consider retirement.
The incentive will be paid from the district’s management fund, allowing a savings in the general fund.
Infrastructure funding: The board also heard a lengthy presentation by Matthew Gillaspie of Piper Jaffray on the district’s capacity to borrow money and the ins and outs of school bond issues for infrastructure improvements, both in general across Iowa and specific to the Greene County district. He provided the board with several pages of figures showing history and trends.
“If you’re contemplating a large project you’re going to be using taxpayers’ money, whether it’s property taxes, sales taxes, whatever, and you need to know the implications of using that money,” Gillaspie told the board. “You need to really understand how it works, and if you do something today, what that’s going to do for the next 15 or 20 years to the school’s PPEL fund, sales tax fund, etc.”
Gillaspie based most of his comments on a proposal for a $19.8 million project requiring a $16,440,000 bond issue.
Voters last September turned down a request for a $20 million bond issue for a $22.5 million project for new construction and remodeling of the current high school so that all students in grades 5-12 would attend school there. A small addition to the elementary school in Jefferson was also part of the project. The school’s facilities committee has been meeting since that election and plans to hold a special election in April.
In summary, Gillaspie told the board that the debt would be well within the district’s capacity to borrow. A $16.44 million bond issue would require a levy of $2.30 (per thousand dollars of taxable valuation) to repay. He explained that using the homestead tax credit and the state-mandated rollback on residential property, the owner of a $100,000 home would see an increase in property taxes of $116 per year.
He also explained the difference between market value and average assessed value of agricultural land, noting that the average assessed value in Greene County is $2,154 and that after the state rollback, the taxable value is $993 per acre. Calculations using the assessed value and then the rollback show ag land owners would pay an addition $2.28 per acre per year. An owner of 500 acres of ag land would pay an additional $1,100 per year, not $9,000 as some members of the public claimed last September.
“Eleven hundred dollars is still a lot of money, and that particular voter can vote ‘no,’ and they should vote ‘no’ if they don’t want the project. That’s everyone’s prerogative to do that. But they should not vote ‘no’ if they want the project but they thought $9,000 was what they were going to pay and that was too much, too big of a burden for them. They’re making a mistake. They don’t understand the taxation,” Gillaspie said.
He told the board that he works with school districts all over Iowa with infrastructure bond proposals and that very few of them are approved on the first ballot.
