Valmeyer voters in the June 28 election will decide whether or not to increase the property tax limiting rate for its school district.

The proposition says the limiting rate under the Property Tax Extension Limitation Law for the Valmeyer school district would increase by 15.64 percent, resulting in a limiting rate of 4.0663 percent.

The vote comes at the end of a five-year plan to allow Valmeyer to sell bonds in order to maintain funds for the school district. 

This, according to Valmeyer School Superintendent Eric Frankford, was a renewal of the plan to sell bonds that started in 2012.

“Ten years ago in 2012, we went to the voters after the state cut funding for the school district of about $700,000,” Frankford said. “We went to the voters and asked to sell working cash bonds for $1.5 million over five years, roughly $300 thousand a year that we would use to replace, at least partially, that lost funding.”

Essentially, rather than reinstating another five years of selling bonds, the proposition seeks to increase the tax extension.

Frankford said the decision comes primarily due to the cost of selling bonds.  Between various fees and interest, the district loses a substantial amount of money from selling. An increase to the tax extension would allow the school district to receive more of the funds directly.

The switch, Frankford said, shouldn’t be too big of a change for voters, who have already been paying for the bonds for the last decade.

“It’s kind of a little bit of a shell game for their taxes because yes, they’ll pay 15 percent, roughly, more for the school taxes but they won’t be paying off those bonds,” Frankford said. “So the amount they pay will, for the most part, be a wash.”

Property taxes for Valmeyer are complicated due to the previously mentioned PTELL law, which limits the growth of a taxing district’s property tax levy (what the district asks for in December) to 5 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower.

PTELL impacts taxing districts in Monroe County. Waterloo and Columbia aren’t affected by PTELL since they also have parcels of land in other counties. Since Valmeyer’s land is exclusively in Monroe County, the property tax rate is adjusted differently.

“If we were under the same rules as, say, Columbia and Waterloo, we would be receiving more than what we’re even asking for doing this,” Frankford said.

Frankford said that he hopes voters will see the school district is not asking for more than it has in the past. 

Given voters have already shown support for this sort of proposal in the previous bond-selling votes and this proposal would see more taxpayer money staying in the district, Frankford said he hopes voters would continue to support the school district on June 28.

“We want to be good financial stewards,” Frankford said. “We came up with this number based on what we have been receiving from the taxpayers up until this point. That way when we go to the voters and we say ‘This is what you’ve already been paying, the only difference is now we get more of it because we’re not paying the interest and the fees.’”