School referendums crowd November ballots amid property tax changes

ANDERSON, Ind. — A school superintendent on Thursday said he will need to make cuts even if voters renew his property tax levy.

Anderson Community School Corporation is one of 40 school corporations statewide holding a property tax referendum this year for operating expenses. It’s the first round of school referendums since state lawmakers passed a new property tax law last year. Among other things, the law limits by how much property taxes can grow each year and requires traditional public schools to share their tax revenue with charter schools beginning in 2028. When combined with inflation and the increase in funding directed to school vouchers, Superintendent Joseph Cronk said his schools get less out of their property tax levy than they did when it was approved in 2018.

“Anderson is an impoverished district,” he said. “It’s part of the old Rust Belt. Effects from SEA 1 have severely impacted our financial picture and our ability to deliver services to our students.”

Many of the referendums on November’s ballot ask voters to increase property taxes to offset the impacts of the new property tax law. Cronk said Anderson Community Schools is only asking its voters to renew its current property tax levy. He said he has already taken steps including eliminating some administrative staff positions as people leave and renegotiating some contracts. He also plans to eliminate some school bus routes next year. If the levy fails, he said more drastic measures might be necessary.

“You could potentially see cuts to transportation,” he said. “You could see increaed class size, and anyone that’s in education knows there’s an inverse relationship to class size and learning. So larger class sizes could inhibit learning. But when you don’t have the money to pay for things, you make do with what you have.”

Tyler Elmore, the school corporation’s chief financial officer, said Anderson Community Schools gets 44% of its revenue from property taxes, a share he said is typical. Another 24% comes from debt service in the form of bonds, with the rest coming from the state’s school funding formula. Elmore said the new property tax law has not reduced the corporation’s tax revenue, but it has limited how much it can grow.

The changes to property taxes were brought on by an uproar among homeowners and some business owners over rapid increases in assessed valuation. Bryce Curry, the CEO of Premier Arms in Brownsburg, said the property taxes he pays on his building have gone up by 46% since 2018, even after he appealed to the Hendricks County Assessor. Curry said so far, he has been able to absorb those costs, but if it keeps up, it will mean higher prices for his customers. He said property taxes are his second-highest expense, after payroll.

“Any expense that a business incurs has to be put into the factor of the profits, the markups, the margins, and in our industry in general, the margins are pretty thin to begin with,” he said. “At a certain point, as in a lot of businesses, eventually you have to start passing that on to the consumer.”

Curry said most of the business owners he knows have seen property tax spikes of 10-20% over the same period. He said most businesses lease their building space rather than owning it outright, but higher property taxes mean higher leases for them. Curry said he used to own rental properties and he had to raise rents whenever property taxes went up. He said before schools ask for more money, they should examine their own financial decisions.

“They really need to look inside their four walls and say, what expenses can they cut, what salaries can they cut, what programs can they cut,” he said. “That may not be popular, but to simply go out to your tax base with your hand out every single year, it seems, in a lot of cases, and simply say, ‘We just need more money,’ but then we see them building a brand-new sports field. Do we need another sports field? Does that need to be built?”

The Indiana Department of Local Government Finance has a calculator tool on its website homeowners can use to determine how much a property tax referendum in their area would cost them.

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