New taxes would fund a new high school in the Gulf Shores feeder district.

“How they could legally transfer their obligations and responsibilities to an organization that doesn’t have any authority under state law anyway (i.e. the Special Tax District) just doesn’t seem to make sense. Under the law there is no entity for a tax district. That’s all part of the county board of education.””

DENNIS HEARD Senior Policy Analyst, Alabama Department of Education

MONTGOMERY – If a Special Tax District is ever formed in any of the seven feeder patterns, it will be a difficult task limiting the Baldwin County Board of Education’s involvement.

Dennis Heard, a Senior Policy Analyst with the Alabama Department of Education, says no matter how the board of trustees in each district is configured, no matter who else is involved, the county is the one ultimately holding the bag.

Heard said his comments are not directly related to Baldwin County but generally apply to any school board in the state setting up Special Tax Districts.

“How they could legally transfer their obligations and responsibilities to an organization that doesn’t have any authority under state law anyway (i.e. the Special Tax District) just doesn’t seem to make sense,” Heard said. “Under the law there is no entity for a tax district. That’s all part of the county board of education.”

Any question of liability on construction or accidents or incidents on the property of the schools built with special tax funds still falls to the county board, Heard said.

“The county board is over the funding that comes in with that district tax,” he said. “They will be responsibility for any kind of code violations with the building or if there is a problem with the Alabama Building Commission. The board’s going to be responsible for it.”

Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon has expressed several issues with the Memorandum of Understanding between the board of trustees and the Baldwin County Board of Education. A local citizens’ group is hoping to bring a Special Tax District to the Gulf Shores High School feeder pattern up for a vote.

The group missed the deadline to be on the Nov. 8 general election ballot after Kennon expressed his concerns with the first draft of the Memorandum of Understanding at a July 19 council meeting.

Officials in the district must agree on who has representatives on the board of trustees and how many from Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, unincorporated areas of Fort Morgan and Ono Island and a representative from the county level.

Kennon wants the county board to have no voting power on deciding how the money is spent, but may agree to a nonvoting representative in an advisory role.

“We need to make sure the language is very, very clear that when the board of trustees makes a recommendation that meets all school board regulations and rules and state law, permission will not unreasonably be withheld,” Kennon said of the county board. “We want whatever legal lingo is needed so they don’t continue to control our destiny and do as poor a job in the future as they have in the past.”

Kennon says the county will always have the final say on any decisions made at the local level when it goes to the county level. Therefore he’s against school board involvement in the district board of trustees.

“Until somebody shows me that they are required to sit on the board, I don’t want them involved,” he said. “They have a vote when it goes to the county level so there’s no reason they should be involved on the local level.

“For them to have a redundancy on the local and school board level makes no sense to me.”

Heard reiterated that money raised in these special districts must be spent on education for those districts. And the same amount of money previously coming to the schools in the district would continue.

“It won’t be replacing anything else,” he said. “In the Gulf Shores area, what they are proposing, every bit of it is going to go for all the issues dealing with the new school itself. If it didn’t, the extra money would still be used for that. It wouldn’t reduce any money going to that area because of that.”

In the long run, Heard said, new schools in the feeder patterns funded by a new tax would give the county some financial relief.

“Just common sense would mean if they do any schools then the school system wouldn’t have to buy or rent portable unit for Gulf Shores High School so some expenses may go down just because they have a new school there,” he said.

Heard said he is award of only one other county, Talladega, where special tax districts were formed for the sole purpose of raising money to build new schools.

“Its how they got the new high schools built in Talladega County by setting up school tax districts in places like Lincoln and in Childersburg,” he said. “The citizens in the area approved taxes themselves to have a new high school building there.”