How Can Taxes Go Down with Approval of a Referendum?

The small capital improvement referendum on May 28 will require a slight increase in taxes to pay for our share of the $7.7 million in bonds.  You can see in this chart in the column labeled "Tax Amount for Referendum, that we project no more than 1.5 cent increase in 2015, a .5 cent increase in 2016 and a .5 cent increase in 2017 (that's right- half a penny).   The total increase is 2.5 cents over 3 years.

However, we also project annually reducing our  current Debt Service Tax, which exists to pay for past bond sales.  You can see in  the column labeled "Proposed Debt Service Rate w/o Referendum", that rate is presently 14.5 cents.  We plan to reduce that existing rate by 2 cents in 2015, 1 cent in 2016, another 1 cent in 2017 and .5 cent decrease in 2018.

So we increase 2.5 cents in 3 years and decrease 4.5 cents over 4 years.  The end result, even with approval of this referendum on May 28 is a Debt Service Tax Rate that is, by 2018,  2 cents lower than it is today.   That's a good deal.