Request won’t top 6 mills, Gilmore says

It’s been 17 years since the Green Forest School District asked residents to pass a millage increase.

In that time, the district has managed to complete 14 facility upgrades to repair aging buildings dating as far back as the 1920s and 1960s.

The time has come, however, when repairs are no longer sufficient — especially for a high school building that is 65 years old — and the district is beginning a campaign to ask the community to support a millage increase of up to 6 additional mills.

The money earned through additional taxes, along with $9.990 million awarded from the state of Arkansas would help fund a $25 million facility across the street from the current high school that would house students in grades 7 through 12, second-year superintendent David Gilmore said.

“We’ve not actually asked for an increase in our millage since 2008 in this district and we’ve done quite a few projects on our own here just by saving up money and being good stewards of our money,” Gilmore said. “We’ve done up to 14 pretty major projects here on campus but building a school is far above and beyond like repairing a roof or building a small structure, things like that.”

Gilmore made it very clear: The project is “a need, not a want.”

“If you go on the Arkansas Division of Public School Academic Facilities and Transportation website, they keep track of schools, they monitor schools, they come in and do walk-throughs every year to make sure schools are adequate to have kids in them,” Gilmore said. “We’re getting to the point where it’s kind of that we’re at the end of that road with some of our current structures. I looked on that website and it showed us to be number 12 out of 234 schools as in need of extra space and then we’re number 20 out of 982 in need of a warm, safe, building for our district.

“We currently have kids in a 1928 building that was built here on campus. It’s our old red brick building. As you can imagine, coming up on a hundred years, we’ve taken good care of it, but we’ve gotten about all we can get out of it. You know, at this point, it needs to be replaced. The high school, some of our records ... shows it was originally built in 1960, and that structure has been added on to four different times, with the the most current one being in1993.”

The high school building has an array of issues, Gilmore said, including sagging floors and some restrooms that are inoperable. An ADA-compliant facility is also crucial, he said.

“The high school building has a lot of structural issues that we’ve had to repair,” Gilmore said. “We’ve got places in the floors that have sagged down quite a bit, several inches, where actually the floor has pulled away from the wall in certain places causing rodent issues and structural safety concerns.

“Over the years the district has actually three different times spent money up to $240,000 bringing the foundation back up to level, and it just keeps continuing to fall. I had my maintenance supervisor go over there the other day with a level and take some pictures just showing that floor and it was several inches out of square right now, which causes all kinds of issues for the building. We’ve had doors that we’ve had to have the maintenance guys come in there and actually take them off the hinges just to get the door off because it settles and it sticks.

“There’s just a lot of issues with that building and it’s just time that we don’t continue to spend more and more money into it, throwing good money after bad, and it is time to replace those structures and get all of our kids back into a warm and safe structure.”

A new building would also help eliminate portable buildings that have been utilized many years longer than the original plan, Gilmore said.

“We definitely need to ask for this millage within our community to be able to have a good, sound educational facility for our students in the future,” he said. “… We have trailer buildings in place on campus that are meant to be temporary, but from my records they have been here since 1989, and I know we have board members who are in their mid-40s and went to school in those classes. … It’s time to replace those and get those out of here and get our kids into a warm, safe, dry structure.”

In order to take advantage of the nearly $10 million the district would receive from the state for the construction of a new school, it’s imperative for the millage increase to be successful, Gilmore said.

Between now and when the proposal will go before voters in November, the district will prepare materials — in various languages — to educate the public on what the millage increase means and how it will impact residents. The campaign’s motto is ‘Our School, Our Community, Our Future,’ the superintendent said.

According to information provided by Gilmore, Green Forest’s current tax rate of 36 mills is the lowest among 12 schools either in Carroll County or in the Tigers’ athletic conference.

Berryville, which has completed an array of building projects over the years, has a millage rate of 42.2 while Eureka Springs is at 36.1. The highest of the 12 schools mentioned in Gilmore’s report is Gentry in far northwest Benton County at 46 mills.

“The millage currently is 36, which is the lowest in our area in Carroll County between Berryville, Eureka Springs and Green Forest,” Gilmore said. “And I also checked compared to the athletic conference that we’re in, and we’re by far the lowest on that. We’re 36 mills. Berryville is currently at 42.2. They raised their millage several years back. And if you look at the facilities in Berryville compared to our facilities, they’ve done a really nice job of building some new facilities and replacing some of the older ones. And that’s where we’re at as a district. We’re ready to get to that point.”

Increasing the district’s millage by 6 mills won’t cost families as much as may be preconceived, Gilmore said.

“We’re going to be looking at going either 6 or fewer mills to be able to fund this project,” he said. “A mill is based off of our overall tax assessment. We have a much lower tax assessment in Green Forest than even Berryville, or especially Eureka, does so our mills don’t bring in quite as much. But, we don’t want to be a burden on the taxpayer, we don’t want to add additional taxes that we don’t feel like we need to.”

Many households in the district would pay approximately an additional $9-$10 a month in taxes if a 6-mill increase is approved, Gilmore said.

“Now is the time to build and we’ve really sharpened the pencil on this thing to bring down the amount of money we would have to ask for from the taxpayers,” he said. “I’ve been doing a lot of math on it. Just a lot of houses that I know here in town, people that have duplexes here in town and most of them are coming out to be about $9 a month is all we would have to ask. I know the farmers really worry about that because a lot of them do have a lot of land and different structures on there but the farmland is actually assessed to a different value as well and it’s not been as bad as I’ve seen. I’ve talked to a lot of people who thought his was going to increase their taxes by hundreds of dollars a month, and we found out that it might be between $20 and $40 in some cases. … I’m hoping people see the value in this and see the necessity of this and to see that we have to get this done, and now is the time because we have that money from the state department. I was told the other day that across the state they only gave out $72 million total in partnership money and we received right at 10 million of that in Green Forest so I thought that was a good number. I feel like if we would apply for that again it would take quite a while to get it, and we probably wouldn’t get as much, quite honestly, in the future, so now really is the time to build for this.”

Gilmore said it’s important for property owners to remember that mills paid are determined by assessed values, not appraised values.

“The assessed value and the appraised value are completely different in my opinion,” Gilmore said. “I looked at a house, for example, in Green Forest here and it was a very nice house. One of the nicer homes in town, and it was on the market for just a little bit over $300,000. But, when they come in and assess that through the assessor’s office, that number is usually quite a bit lower than that. The house I was looking at only assessed for about $175,000 and then they only tax you 20 percent of that. So, that person was going to only pay about an extra $17 a month [if the millage passes] for that very nice house.

“So, if you have an assessed value of $100,000, they would take only 20 percent of that, so $20,000, and then you multiply that by 0.006 for the 6 mills and that’s what we’re looking at when you get between $9 and $10 a month, somewhere in that ballpark. Most of the houses that I found here in town probably would be around that $9 mark.”

Another example, Gilmore said, is someone who owned an undeveloped piece of land.

“One gentleman has a 35-acre plot of wooded land. Did not have any structures on it,” he said. “His taxes were only going to go up $6 a year. We’re talking 50 cents a month on something like that.

“This is why we wanted to bring our estimates down to the 6 mills, and that would still put us under what Berryville has and still under what a lot of our athletic competitors out there are at.”

CLASSROOM SPACE TOP PRIORITY

To keep a millage increase as a reasonable request, Gilmore said plans have been trimmed down a bit.

Original plans were for a building of more than 90,000 square feet, but Gilmore quickly realized that would take a millage increase that would be too much of a burden on taxpayers, so he trimmed down to fundamental needs.

The current high school gym and cafeteria are in good enough shape to keep, so those would remain as is, he said.

A 72,000-squarefoot, multi-story building would be built across the street from the current high school with plans to house seventh- and eighth-grade students in one area and grades 9-12 in another.

A performing arts building is also in the plans, Gilmore said.

“The new building would probably take the place of the old red brick building and go into what used to be our bus shop area, which is currently like a maintenance facility,” he said. “… The builders looked at the property and really like the location. It’s not on a low spot on campus where they would have to build up the grounds to keep it out of the water. There’s a lot of utilities right there that could easily be connected to and it’s about the same distance of walk that the kids have now to the gym or the cafeteria.”

While the building would be for grades 7 through 12, younger students would also benefit from the project, the superintendent said.

“It’ll help those younger grades because we do have kids out in those older trailers,” he said. “We’d be able to move those kids inside and shift kids throughout the district in order to get everyone into an adequate, warm, dry structure. Yeah, our elementary school is a little bit older, but it’s still holding up good and doesn’t have the structural issues that our high school has.”

Taxpayers would be assured that what the district is planning and hoping for are educational needs without the “wants” of projects that other districts have executed over the years, Gilmore said.

“We’re not building athletic facilities and things like that,” he said. “You see a lot of schools doing things like that. And, you know, we would love to have those things and maybe someday. But, right now we need classroom space and that’s our main priority here. We’re just trying not to overwhelm the taxpayer and just ask for the minimum amount that we need.

“Anytime you ask, or you’re talking to people about a tax increase, it gets tough. It’s always a tough conversation. But, I do know a lot of people that keep saying: ‘Hey, our facilities are so far behind everybody else.’

“…If you go to other schools, they have giant gyms and turf football fields and the whole deal. We’re not trying to do all that. We are just trying to build space that is adequate for the future here without being a burden on the the taxpayer.”

TIMELINE

If the millage is approved, plans would proceed immediately, Gilmore said.

“As soon as we know that going to increase, our architect can hit the ground running,” he said. “He’s already got started, you know, kind of looking at a few things here so he’s not having to start from square one. He can hit the ground running on the design, which it would probably take until late summer, early fall of 2026 to get it designed. And then it’s going to take a couple years to build it. So, I mean, it could be 2028 before we actually get into this thing.

“But, the longer we put this off, the longer we kick the can down the road, the more it could cost, as we all know, labor prices go up, material prices go up, and we could take the chance of losing that $9.90 million that we have from the state department. We’ve got to get this thing going as soon as possible because this is gonna cost us more in the future.”

Not doing anything could possibly jeopardize the district in many ways, Gilmore said.

“I’d hate to be in a situation where we’re no longer able to use those facilities and we’re scrambling to do something else and overall the state department can come in here if we don’t pass a millage within our community, they can actually come in and in certain situations they’ve had to remove the superintendent and remove the school board,” he said. “The state would build a new school facility for them, but then they take away all the extracurriculars, any of the athletics, the band, things like that. Anything that isn’t required to graduate, and they take that money and they put it toward paying them back for that school structure. I mean that’s obviously a worst-case scenario, and as you can imagine, that would be detrimental to our school district.”

The district will have to submit to the Carroll County Clerk’s office by Sept. 1 the final decision on how many mills are being asked on the November ballot, Gilmore said, adding that it wouldn’t be more than 6 mills.

“We need this,” he said. “It’s time for the district. The newest facility we have on campus is our middle school, which was built in 2012. That was a great addition to our campus, but it’s time to do a little more to stay up-to-date so we don’t have all our facilities get to the point where we’re needing everything at once.

“… We need our community, so if anyone values education and values the future of the Green Forest School District, it’s time to come in and help us out. We really need you.”