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Subtract 7°~ commercial base: - $ 24,500 Total residential input $325,500 - 6500 ** _ $50.08 per student ** 6,500 represents number of students that district sends to public schools Thus, when commercial base is subtracted from the equation, and we compare residential input from the CHCCS district with the residential input from the OCS district, it's apparent that OCS residents contribute $2.00 per student more than CHCCS residents do. Is this significant? Yes, for several very important reasons: 1. It debunks the myth that Chapel Hill parents are somehow "subsidizing" the OCS. In fact, the opposite could be argued. (Albeit $2 is hardly worth arguing over.) 2. It shows how important that commercial base is to the city schools. All county residents contribute to the businesses in Chapel Hill and Carrboro - we shop, eat, take dance lessons, pay office rent, and work there. The whole county contributes to it. Why shouldn't OCS share the benefit of that tax base? Another way to look at the benefits of that tax base: When a Chapel Hill family is taxed 20 cents (for the district tax}, the burden is actually only 80 °~ of that tax, or 16 cents. CHCCS can rely on the commercial base to pick up the other 4 cents. In OCS, residents would pay 93°~, or 18.6 cents (commercial interests paying only 1.4 cents) of a 20-cent tax. 3. Any "district tax" levied in the C)CS district will be borne more heavily by homeowners/residential than in the city district. 4. The original Chapel Hill school district, established in 1909, encompassed only a few blocks downtown around the university. The CHCCS has grown enormously, gobbling up the commercial base. This benefits only one school district. 5. More than 60 percent of OCS land is in the agricultural and forestry "use-value" tax category, providing far fewer tax dollars. This is a wonderful program, and we need it to encourage farmers to remain on their land. Similarly, Chapel Hill has the university, which is exempted from paying property taxes. (The CHCCS district has a minor number of acres in the "use-value" program, roughly 10,000 acres compared to 600,000 in the OCS district.} 6. There are far more restrictions on commercial growth in the OCS district that will prohibit OCS from growing its commercial base. Should the county sacrifice its land-use planning guidelines in order to facilitate greater commercial development for OCS? If the county prohibits commercial development along the I-40 and I-85 corridors, is there a way to compensate OCS residents for keeping these areas green? We can't allow industry near the watershed protection areas, most of which are in the OCS district. But surely there's a way to alleviate the tax burden somewhat for OC5 residents, if you choose to keep the school districts separate. How can all county residents equally share the cost of keeping greenspace, and the benefits of the commercial base? Thank you. Sincerely, Elizabeth A. Brown Grey Burtz said that this is about the funding mechanism and he keeps hearing about the funding disparity. The problem is with the funding mechanism and it caps the per pupil funding and makes it impossible to fund Orange County Schools. This is a fundamental flaw that needs to be fixed. The kids in the Orange County system are not getting the basic needs. He made reference to the phase 1 costs - capital improvements to the schools. He said that it amazed him that there was $2.5 million for CHCCS and nothing far Orange County Schools. He found out that the reason was that most of the money had been eaten up by debt service payments, which the County agreed to pay in 1997 to cover half of the cast of the bonds for Cedar Ridge High School. He wonders if CHCCS has offered to pay using those monies for some of their schools. He finds it hard to believe that we cannot cover the costs of new schools with bond monies. He does not feel the funding is being equally shared and distributed to the two systems.