School board members look to parcel tax School board members look to parcel tax (December 15, 2000)

By Justin Scheck

Less than a month after Mountain View School District cost-cutting shuffled over 100 elementary school students from class to class and raised community concerns about the district's financial management, board members have brought up the possibility of instituting a new land tax that could bring more money into the school district.

Rose Filicetti, a trustee on the Mountain View and Mountain View-Whisman merged school boards, has indicated she will push for the merged school board to run a campaign for a parcel tax in Mountain View.

The parcel tax, which would require a two-thirds majority approval from the community before it could be instituted, would charge landowners an annual fee on top of their existing property taxes. The revenues from the parcel tax would be used to fund a predetermined set of school programs.

Revenues from the tax could be used to make up for projected state funding losses that would occur if school enrollment continues to decline. But Filicetti said she hopes to use the additional revenue to improve the new district's educational programs.

"It could allow us to return to days of yore when we had full-time librarians and music programs," Filicetti said. "It could supplant some of the funding we would not receive from the state. But in my mind, it would be used to continue and improve ongoing programs."

However, such a parcel tax measure appears far away. "There's a recognition on the part of the trustees that it is something we'll go after. But the board has not met to discuss it," said Carol Fisher, also a trustee on the Mountain View and merged boards.

A number of area school districts have a parcel tax, including Los Altos, Filicetti said.

Filicetti did not know how much the tax would be or how it would be assessed, although she said it would likely be a flat rate per parcel, not dependent on parcel size. She speculated that the tax would be "in the hundreds of dollars" range.

When asked about the likelihood of the school board getting a two-thirds majority vote from a community that has called the Mountain View district's financial management into question, Fisher said, "There is a lot of partial information and misunderstood information that is raising these concerns... While I do understand that people have concerns, I feel very confident that the district could respond to them."

Fisher said that "if (the district has) well-defined uses for the funds ... that the community really values, we generally get a large amount of support. The parcel tax is an option for which we have to sell the idea to the community and get their support."

Both Fisher and Filicetti, along with Mountain View and merged board trustee Russ Wood, said that talk of the parcel tax now is so early -- so far away even from the planning stages -- that they did not have any information on what the specifics of the measure would look like.