We were looking back at our coverage of Whitfield County’s education Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (ESPLOST) and we came across a few statements that caught our eyes:
• ESPLOST proponents in Whitfield County say continuing the 1 percent sales tax is the fairest way to provide local schools the revenue they need to deal with growing student populations, reductions in funding from the state and state-mandated class size reductions.
• “The ESPLOST provides an opportunity for all citizens and non-resident shoppers to participate instead of relying solely on local property owners to pay their property taxes.”
• The ESPLOST will “pay for a new high school, new elementary school, new buses, and renovations and additions for Whitfield County Schools, and additions, modifications and renovations to five Dalton City schools.”
• “The ESPLOST is a wonderful avenue for us to meet the needs of our facilities and capital projects without causing a burden on the backs of the property taxpayers.”
You may have figured out that all those quotes came from our stories about the ESPLOST that passed in 2006, not the one that passed last week.
Our point is that you must always revisit the past and learn from it to be successful in the future. We hope the leadership of Whitfield County Schools revisits the spending decisions school system officials made in the past, ones that left the school system millions of dollars in debt, so they will not put citizens in the future in the position we were in this year. Voters were basically told “either vote for this tax or we will tax you a different way to pay down debt and get what we think we need.”
We hope that in five years our community will be able to have a more objective discussion about the needs of our school systems to continue to stay ahead of the education curve without the threat of debt and how to pay it down.
Opinion
August 7, 2012
Editorial: Learn from history or repeat it
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