🎥 City hears request from USD 489 for special purpose sales tax

A standing room only crowd at Thursday's Hays city commission work session listens to a presentation by Ron Wilson, USD 489 superintendent, (at right) requesting a one-half cent sales tax election to help pay off a potential $143.5 million school bond issue. Commissioners will vote on the ballot request at their Feb. 10 meeting.

By BECKY KISER
Hays Post

The audience in the Hays City Commission chambers overflowed into the hallway Thursday night during a presentation by Ron Wilson, USD 489 superintendent, requesting a one-half cent city sales tax election to help pay off a potential $143.5 million school bond issue.

"This bond issue is about space," Wilson told commissioners. "Yes, we have aging facilities that have been well taken care of exceptionally well for a lot of years, but really what this bond issue is about is creating space at all grade levels for our enrollments."

Wilson shared statistics showing all the USD 489 schools since 2006, except for Lincoln Elementary, have more students than the capacity for which they were built and enrollments are predicted to continue growing.

USD 489 student enrollment is over capacity at five of the district's six school buildings and projected to continue growing.

He also noted the Hays school district receives no state aid for new building construction because it's considered a "property wealthy" district.

A survey of school district patrons showed 52 percent of the 1,100 respondents said a one-half cent sales tax would make them more likely to support the bond issue. The 10-year sales tax would be used to reduce the property tax requirement of the 30-year bond. Wilson said the intent would be to ask for a renewal of the sales tax after 10 years "until our bonds are paid off in full."

"We just feel really confident that this is an investment in our community and for the betterment of a great future for Hays."

If approved by voters, the city sales tax would be used to reduce the property tax requirement of the proposed 30-year bond issue.

The district's last school bond issue - which Wilson described as a non-glitzy "fix it" bond issue - was approved by local voters in 1992, when Mayor Mason Ruder was one year old.

"Doug Williams (Grow Hays executive director) is always saying the hierarchy of a community's needs is housing, jobs and schools. If you don't have the schools for the people's children who we need the jobs for, and we don't have the housing to support them, the whole thing collapses," Ruder said.

"If we can be a part of that by allowing the citizens to decide how they want to fund it, I don't think we should be in the way of that."

Commissioners Sandy Jacobs, Reese Barrick and Shaun Musil also expressed their support of the sales tax question and bond project.

"Yeah, our sales tax would potentially be higher," Musil said, "but we haven't seen the negative effects so far (of the recent passage of a county sales tax.) It's actually grown."

The mill levy for USD 489 is presently one of the lowest in Kansas.

If both the bond issue and sales tax were to pass, "it puts us in the middle of the 5A school districts," Wilson told commissioners. "There are 32 5A districts. We're at the very bottom currently."