Agenda - 02-12-2004-6 - Laserfiche WebLink

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0iD Commissioners would need to agree, if at all, on what that money would be used for, besides the general title of capital and current expense. Geof Gledhill: If the referendum is called by the Board of County Commissioners on its own initiative, the statutes do provide some ability on the part of the County Commissioners to direct where the money would be spent in the ballot question. I think I'd want to look at that more carefully before giving you an opinion as to how much flexibility there is in that area. That's a nuance that I didn't spend a lot of time on. But I know that in the enabling legislation for calling these referendums, there is some discretion provided for the group calling for the election and directing where that money goes. There was something else that you said that prompted me to want to comment. Chair Jacobs: Time limit. She asked about time Commissioner Gordon: I don't remember stating it that way, Oh yes, it said that within a certain number of days after the close of the month or something, the money had to be remitted to the school system. And that's a little different from the way we appropriate money Essentially, what I was interested in asking had to do with just how general it was versus how specific, and what kind of discretion the Board of County Commissioners had, and how it might be used. There are a lot of different things you went through, kind of like the last one, had to do with the County Commissioner initiative. I was just trying to make sure that I understood that as distinguished from all the other initiatives, which seem to have many more limitations than the County Commissioner initiated countywide supplemental tax. Geof Gledhill: That surprised me as well. Let me answer that question further than I have, but let me also make the point that a supplemental tax is not a County appropriation. Once the County Commissioners set the tax rate, the money belongs to the schools and it is not an appropriation like the annual current expense appropriation or the annual capital appropriation from the County Commissioners,. And what that means is that the money is turned over as we speak with respect to the Chapel Hill - Carrboro school system district tax as it's collected. And you've seen that some in the different way in which fund balances are presented to you in order to accommodate that different way in which the money comes to the school systems. On the other hand, the County's current expense appropriation comes to the school systems monthly, in 12 monthly increments, to help them in their fund balance work and in their need for the same amount of money, generally speaking, each month. Commissioner Gordon: And I guess the last thing is that it would have to be appropriated per pupil, per average daily membership and so forth, collected countywide and then distributed per pupil. Geof Gledhill: That is exactly right. If the County Commissioners are interested in me providing more information on how finely you can draw the ballot question, then I will be glad to look at that, but I have not spent time with that in this work. There is one other important nuance between a County Commissioner initiated supplemental tax and one that results from an initiative from the Boards of Education, and that is that for some reason, the North Carolina law provides that where the countywide supplemental tax is initiated by the Boards of Education, a successful election results in any other district supplemental tax going away as a result of the election. And in fact the ballot must say that. There is no similar provision in a county initiated countywide supplemental tax election, for example. So that if the election for a supplemental tax countywide was initiated by the Board of County Commissioners, the Chapel Hill- Carrboro City Schools district tax could remain in place, I guessed at why that might be in a letter that I wrote to you, but I really do not know why that is the case, it just is the case.