This Thursday, Oct. 9, the Union County Board of Education is expected to give property owners a slight break on their upcoming tax bills in a called meeting to set the 2025 millage rate. The meeting will take place at 7:30 a.m. inside the Central Office.
Each year, state law requires tax-levying authorities to calculate a rollback rate, which is the rate needed for a revenue-neutral levy of property taxes.
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The School Board can adopt the rollback rate or lower in a single meeting, but to prevent automatic tax increases due to inflation, board members must advertise a tax increase and hold three public hearings to set anything above the rollback.
Fortunately, the latter won’t be necessary this year. To the contrary, the millage rate that is all set for adoption this week is lower than the calculated rollback.
“The actual rollback rate was 6.928, but we estimated the rate of 6.853 based on the digest numbers we were given in July,” said Chief Operations Officer Karen Bundy. “We are going to honor the estimate to reduce the taxpayers’ property taxes even further.”
With the slight reduction, the School Board is estimated to receive about $171,000 less in property tax collections versus 2024, making for a 0.87% reduction in the total levy. But that’s OK since the Board Office figured its operating budget with the lower rate in mind.
School Board members briefly discussed the millage rate in their Sept. 25 regular meeting, with Board Member Jason McCarter saying, “We’re happy to do (this) for the community.”
In other Sept. 25 meeting news, some potential plans for Union County Middle School were discussed in the work session. Particularly, this would include adding more parking.
Measuring about 230 feet by 50 feet, the space would include 30 parking spots to be surrounded by a block wall. The proposal comes after Superintendent John Hill announced that a survey among UCMS staff revealed a core challenge to be parking.
Principal Tammy Hughes said the facility was short about 11 parking spaces for staff, and McCarter asked whether the work would “cannibalize” existing parking spaces near the gym.
“They do not utilize that parking during the day with students there because of where it’s at in the gym area,” said Hill, explaining that while the addition would only measure about half an acre, it would cover the missing spots, allow for growth and provide more space for visitors during special events.
Discussion turned to how the system would pay for the wall, with E-SPLOST proceeds presented as an option. Regardless, no decisions were made that evening, and the project still has some planning to go through before construction can begin.
The regular meeting wrapped up after a record seven minutes following a run-down of some general upkeep action items that included an update on the status of the system’s sick day bank.
After the Oct. 9 called meeting, the School Board will meet again for its regular monthly work session and voting meeting on Thursday, Oct. 23.
“The Union County Board of Education holds all meetings at the UCBOE Board Room located at 124 Hughes Street,” per the website. “All meetings are OPEN to the public. The Work Session begins at 6:00pm and the Regular Meeting begins at 7:00pm. We welcome your attendance!”
