The state Legislature, in a move that will help Vashon’s cash-strapped school district, has agreed to lift school districts’ so-called levy lids, giving them authority to collect more funding from voter-approved levies than state law currently allows.
In a bill that both chambers have passed and the governor is expected to sign, school districts can collect up to 28.9 percent of their budget from local property owners; currently, the levy lid is 24.9 percent.
The law will help Vashon, where voters recently approved a levy that provided more funding than the district was authorized to collect. The district sought more money than it could collect because of the mounting effort to convince the Legislature to raise the levy lid: Several property-rich school districts have been clamoring for years for greater taxing authority.
The Legislature places lids on the amount of money districts can collect in order to ensure there’s not a great disparity among school districts, with property-poor districts having far fewer resources than property-rich ones. The bill passed, observers said, in part because it included additional state funding for poorer districts, called “equalization” in legislative parlance.
Vashon school officials, who have been among those advocating for a lift in the lid, said the Legislature’s decision will help Vashon. In the budget year that starts this fall, the higher levy lid will mean an additional $250,000 for Vashon schools; next year, when the district will collect money in two installments, the district will collect $500,000 more.
“It’s huge news. I want to celebrate,” said Vashon school board member Kathy Jones, who went to Olympia a few times to advocate for the bill.
Vashon Superintendent Michael Soltman said the greater tax collection will take care of nearly half of the district’s expected shortfall. The district, even with the additional funds, will likely face a $350,000 funding gap in the budget year that begins this fall.
“It makes a huge difference,” he said.
The amount of money the Vashon district will now collect is what voters expected to pay when they approved the operating levy in March, district officials said. The district put forward a levy with an expected tax rate of $1.41 per $1,000 of assessed value. The higher lid, Jones said, “means we’ll return less of the levy to property owners.”
But Hilary Emmer, an Islander who has played an active role in school district discussions, said property owners are going to feel the impact of this decision. “What it means is that our taxes are going to go up significantly,” she said.
According to her calculations, the overall school-based tax rate, as a result of a higher levy lid, will go from $2.57 per $1,000 of assessed value to $2.81, a 9.4 percent increase.
Emmer said she supports the higher levy amount, since those funds help to pay for the basic operational needs of the school district. But school district officials may pay a price for this higher levy lid this fall, she said, when they’ll ask voters to approve a $47 million bond measure to rebuild portions of the Vashon High School.
“If they think this won’t affect the bond, they’re wrong,” she said.
