Board of Aldermen Page 11
May 10, 2016
budget coming forward from the Department of Education is actually looking at possibly adding another
position to service those students because of the amount of travel that is required. My other concern and this
is to Alderman Lopez’s point, is that my understanding is that the state statute provides no more than 10% of
the market value to be taxed. That means we are losing 90% of the market value on these business
properties. We have had conversations about it being important to increase the business property tax revenue
to provide some relief to the citizens of this city. For those reasons | am not going to support this.
Alderman Siegel
Representative Gorman was discussing the amount of state aid which has nothing to do with how much money
we spend on our schools because most of the school money comes from local property taxes, in fact, it’s over
half of our budget. With regard to facilities and whether or not we will be losing a tremendous amount of tax
dollars, there are very few charter schools and the value of the property that they are sitting on even reduced
by 90% is not a significant amount of tax loss compared to the value of the choice and the lessening of the
strain on our existing school system. I’d also like to point out that one of the things that we don’t do for charter
schools is take tremendous amounts of bonding debt. How many bonds do we have outstanding which are
school bonds, a tremendous amount. We have to maintain our schools and that’s one of the things that we do.
We don’t have to do it with this. This is really about widening the amount of choices that people have for their
students to have an education. It’s very clear that the charter schools in and around the city do an excellent
job because of where they are ranked. We also give people an opportunity to have concentrations who have
excellence in certain areas. | certainly wish there was a charter school for the arts when my oldest daughter
was in school because she is graphic artist rignt now. She never had that opportunity; she was just thrown in
with the general population. | don’t see that this is a gigantic cost to the city at all and | see it’s a huge
incentive. Now with regard to whether or not the savings flows through to the landlord, every one of the charter
schools has a lease that is set up such that they pay the taxes separate from the landlord so this does go
directly to them and any on-going new charter schools that may or may not locate here would have this
provision in place and certainly one would guess that they would smart enough to negotiate in their lease that
they would pay the taxes. The sacrifice in actual revenue | don’t see as a big problem, the issue of whether or
not the money will be directed property | don’t see as an issue either. The upside of having these charter
schools is tremendous; it gives people choices and good ones.
Alderman Dowd
| don’t necessarily have a conflict with charter schools but a couple of things that | haven’t heard: | keep
hearing vague numbers about taxes, does anybody know approximately what tax revenue we lose? Another
point is as being the liaison to the Board of Education, as a courtesy, can we ask the Board of Education to
weigh in on this particular bill since they are struggling with their budget and may have a better feel for whether
we should adopt this? The other thing is that we are sort of making the assumption that if we pass then the
tuition per student for the charter school is going to go down. | haven’t heard anything that relates that that is
necessarily going to happen. The only thing that could happen is whoever owns the building is going to be
paying less taxes to the city. | might feel better about this if | knew that the actual school itself was paying the
taxes and we were taking the burden of the taxes away from the school and not the owner the building. | think
there are still some questions and I’m not quite resolved to support this yet.
Alderman Siegel
| don’t Know if Alderman Dowd heard what | said but none of the leases have the landlord responsible for the
taxes, that’s what we found out so all of the charter schools would benefit directly from this tax relief and that
tax relief is not a question of lessening tuition as much as it is providing for a better educational environment |
suppose. | think those questions have been addressed. As far as whether or not the Board of Education
could weigh in, | think the Board of Education has plenty to do with just managing our existing school system
and it would be hard for me to imagine the Board of Education saying sure, that’s great we definitely support
you helping charter schools. It would be unusual to expect that they would do that.
