The ballot initiative extending the one cent sales tax for the Richmond County School System could not have come at a worse time as homeowners throughout the county are still digging out from under Hurricane Helene.
It is also not helpful that the school board cobbled together a gilded wish list that might as well have been written in crayon and festooned with gold stars for good measure.
Proponents say that the initiative will raise $500 million to allow the board to borrow up to $222 million through the issue of general obligation debt.
What do they want to do? For starters, they want to demolish perfectly usable school buildings they claim are obsolete and replace them with brand new “state of the art” buildings.
The sheer length of the ballot initiative seems almost designed to make the voter want to stop reading and move on before coming across phrases such as $20 million for a “contingency project.”
If Augusta/Richmond County’s tax base were growing, we certainly would be in favor of building new infrastructure to accommodate that growth; while the city/county government seems to be headed in the right direction, the growth that comes with good government hasn’t begun to happen yet.
We strongly advise voting “no” to the school board’s one cent sales tax.
