District 200 Tax Notice

The black box of doom (for D200 taxpayers) has greeted holiday shoppers and readers of The Woodstock Independent this week and announced a public hearing for Tuesday, December 15.

If you care about your wallets, you'll want to be at Clay Academy (formerly, Clay Elementary School), 112 Grove Street, at 7:00PM. That's 11 days from now.

Here's what's up. "The corporate and special purpose property taxes extended or abated for 2008 were $42,531,227.82. The proposed corporate and special purpose property taxes to be levied for 2009 at $48,653,000.00. This represents a 14.39 percent increase over the previous year."

Perhaps good questions at the public hearing will be
1. Exactly what does that mean?
2. What are "extended or abated" taxes?
3. Extended until when?
4. Abated until when?
5. Will they be collected in the future?
6. What is the grand total of all "extended or abated" taxes?
7. Is the $42,531,227 part of the $48,653,000, or is it in addition to it?

Does this mean "loaned to the taxpayer until a future date",because it is uncollected now? What happens when those taxes fall due?

Get out your property tax bill and look at the dollar amount collected from you by District 200. Happy about it? If you're not, be at this public hearing.

Check out the rest of the Notice of proposed tax increase. District 200 is requesting a 8.18% increase in estimated property taxes to be levied for debt service and public building commission leases (from $10,407,411.79 in 2008 to $11,258,350.00 in 2009).

Other school districts are consolidating operations. Should District 200 be consolidating? New schools were built and opened in anticipation of large enrollment increases. New home building has stalled in Woodstock. Has that halted enrollment increases? What adjustments are being made to economize on building operations, maintenance, utilities and bus service?