Mill levies, GO bonds on November ballot
Denise Marquez/News-Sun
In addition to the candidates seeking a variety of offices across the county, some Lea County school districts are seeking voter approval to continue funding mill levies and general obligation bonds to support their work in the coming year.
Hobbs voters are being asked for an up-or-down vote on a $2 mill levy and a $4 mill levy; Eunice voters will ponder the question of approving both a $2 mill levy and a $35 million GO bond; and the ballot in Tatum asks residents to vote for or against a $1.8 million GO bond.
Gene Strickland, Hobbs Municipal Schools superintendent, shared a presentation on the mill levies and the projects they fund to the Hobbs Municipal School Board of Education on Sept. 16.
“It’s used for almost everything except direct instruction,” Strickland said. “It allows us to maintain our facilities, to outfit our facilities with equipment. The access to the funds has allowed Hobbs Municipal Schools to have the highest-rated maintenance department in the state of New Mexico. Through a continued commitment of getting better each and every time, our maintenance department continues to get better and continues to find ways to be more effective with the dollars that we have.”
The mill levies financially support ongoing maintenance and building upkeep programs, along with purchases of computers and technology for students. Strickland and Bruce Hatch, Eunice Municipal Schools superintendent, said the mill levies on this year’s ballot are a continuation of an existing tax each municipality’s voters have said “yes” to in the past.
“We’re just trying to continue our Senate Bill 9 and our House Bill 33 monies that we’ve approved in the past,” Hatch said. “It’s helped us with building and maintenance and allows us to upkeep our facilities.”
“Essentially, Hobbs schools and the voters of Hobbs have maintained these property taxes for well over 20 years,” Strickland said. “In fact, we believe it’s approaching 30 years that we’ve maintained these property taxes. So, by no means is this a new tax. It’s a maintaining of an existing tax that we currently have.
The $2 mill levy tax, if approved, will authorize HMS Board of Education, EMS Board of Education, Lea County and the State of New Mexico to impose a property tax if $2 on each $1,000 of net taxable value of the property allocated to the district under the property tax code for property tax years 2027, 28, 29, 30, 31 and 32. The $4 mill involves the imposition of a property tax of $4 on each $1,000 of net taxable value of the property allocated to the district for the same years as the $2 mill levy.
That means, for Hobbs, if both mill levies pass, HMS receives approximately $13 million per year to put back into maintaining its facilities and buildings.
“If you have a home valued at $100,000, you’re taxed on a third of that,” Strickland said. “$100,000 with those six mills comes out to about 56 cents per day on the value of that home (about $198 per year).”
Strickland said many HMS building are aging, especially the plumbing, which is typically the costliest system to repair.
“We still have a healthy inventory of buildings that turn older every single day,” he said. “Plumbing’s been one of our most expensive expenditures. Some of our buildings are 80 years of age, and that plumbing has been in the ground 80 years. The average age of our facilities is in the 60s, as it relates to our existing facilities.”
Eunice Municipal Schools, along with Tatum Municipal Schools, are also hoping voters will approve GO bonds on Nov. 4.
Hatch said the $35 million GO bond will mainly go toward the construction of an early childhood community center.
“Our GO bond we’re kind of rolling this over as well,” Hatch said. “We are going to build, first and foremost, an early childhood learning center for our community. Then we’re also going to build a covered-area for outdoor P.E. (physical education) that the community can also use. We’re building a new administration building and a new maintenance and bus barn facility.”
“But the first thing we are going to build is our early childhood learning center,” he added. “This is a vote for our future. This is something that has never been done in Eunice, as far as an early childhood learning center. This is to give those kids, that we may never be going to meet and never going to know, this is to give them that opportunity to be successful in life.”
Travis Glenn, Tatum Municipal Schools board of education president, said the $1.8 million GO bond will help fund roofing for the High School and gymnasium, and repairing plumbing issues.
“We have a lot of needs and a limited amount of funds to take care of those needs,” he said. “We just have to prioritize what is the most important and the most urgent and try to stretch money as far as it will go. The biggest issues that we have right now is we’re going to be spending some money on roofing at our high school and we have a gym that needs a roof replacement as well so that will take care of a lot of it.”
“We have some plumbing issues that seem to always pop up,” Glenn added. “We have a lot of interior water lines in the buildings that aged out and we can’t get water through them or it’s limited on the water that will go through them so we’re looking at repairing those. We’re looking at updating our science lab and get more up to date equipment in it.”
Glenn said Tatum voters have always supported GO bonds during election time and said he appreciates everyone who goes out to vote.
“We are a very conservative board. We don’t waste the taxpayer’s money,” Glenn said. “Tatum voters have supported the GO bonds always, and the board, we do everything we can to keep our buildings in good repair. We just appreciate them coming out and voting in support of that.
