Every county government needs to be aware of one ramification of school funding reform. Every county appraisal district is funded by a formula based on locally collected taxes. In a county with only two taxing entities, the county with a tax rate of 50� per $100 valuation, and the school with a tax rate of $1.50 per $100 valuation, the county will pay 25% of the appraisal district budget and the school will pay 75% of the appraisal district budget, because the school's tax rate is three times as high as the counties and raises three times the local property taxes.

If school tax reform cuts the school's tax rate to $1.00 per $100 valuation, then the school will be raising twice the local property taxes that the county does, and the share of the appraisal district's budget paid by the county jumps from 25% to 33.3%. In many counties (or small cities)that jump will eat up a large share of the 8% increase allowed each year without a rollback election.

My auditor has proposed that counties and other taxing entities in this fix be allowed for at least one year to exclude the increase in spending brought about by school tax reform from their truth in taxation calculations of the rollback rate. Apparently that was done a decade ago or so to exclude the costs incurred when a county had to house State prisoners for whom there was not room at TDCJ.

I believe that Sen. Lucio's committee will consider this topic on Tuesday, May 2nd, up in Austin.