The Garfield Re-2 School District certified next year’s mill levy on Dec. 15 after discussing it at a regular meeting Dec. 11. 

Jeff Blanford, the chief financial consultant, and Jason Lynch, director of finance, presented on the mill levy and the differences from last year. 

“There’s three types of mills you’re going to certify, the first is the local share,” Lynch began. “That’s going to be about $8.3 million this year…Also our voter approved overrides, which is about $9.2 million, and finally our bond redemption mills, which are about $8.4 million.”

---

---

27.116 mills at a dollar value of nearly $26 million was the final and total number that the board would be approving and Lynch and Blanford said they’d file it the next day, Thursday, Dec. 12, with the state. 

Blanford said that Garfield Re-2’s assessed values have decreased from $1.3 billion last year from Dec. 2023/Jan. 2024 to $957 million in Dec. 2024.

---

---

“It’s not exact, but that change of about $400 million is very close to how much it increased and how much it went down,” Blanford said. “It’ll be interesting to see how the legislature shores that up because they not only (decreased the values) but decreased all the tax rates.” 

Blanford added that decreases in the assessed values result in an increase of mills required to fund bonds and Mill Levy Overrides for the district.

“I was looking across the state,” Lynch said. “It looked to me like assessed values…had gone down, and I’m probably rounding, but it’s right around $1 billion. Ours is odd to see the jump and then almost a correction to the year before.”

Blanford agreed, saying the numbers changing that way is weird, then they got back into the numbers. 

“The local shares, this mill moves up by one every year, we’re moving towards a more equitable balance between local and state,” Lynch said. “Our mill last year was 7.7, it is now moving to 8.7.”

The assessed value of last year applied to the 7.7 mill led to $10.3 million, but with the new assessed value applied to the new 8.7 mill means a drop to $8.3 million being collected. 

“Based on the special legislative session as well as the government’s published budget, these are our collections…that $2 million…we’re not going to be seeing that decrease, they will be backfilling that difference,” Blanford said. “In addition to mills being worth less…they take more to get to the same dollar amount.”

Blanford explained that even though the mills appear to be reducing their collections, the state has mechanisms in place that should backfill. 

The voter-approved override mills changed from last year’s 6.853 mills to 9.613 mills this year, however, the change in collection is from $9,200,515 to $9,201,231, is marginal in terms of assessed values. 

Debt service mills, as explained by Lynch, are mills assessed to service the debt that they have, collecting only exactly as much as they need to service that debt. 

“Last year you can see it’s $8.4 million, last year we could do that with 6.2 mills, this year it takes 8.7 mills to do the same because the mills are worth less than last year,” Lynch said. 

The variance in debt service mills from last year to this year is roughly $35,000, still with a collection baseline of about $8.4 million. 

Per $100,000 in residential total mill levies from last year to this year, the assessment rate has dropped from 7.15% to 6.95%. 

“The homeowners got a break and if you…look at the actual annual tax rates, last year it would’ve been $198.12 per $100,000, this year is $188.46,” Lynch said. 

For commercial businesses per $100,000, the mill levy changed from 27.709 to 27.116 and the tax has gone down from $803.56 to $786.36. 

Board member Cassie Haskell asked, for people who are watching, why they didn’t increase mills to get more revenue to pay teachers more.

“As that piece starts to grow, which by law has grow at 1% a year, as that grows, the part of the state that funds us goes down,” Lynch explained. “It would be a break even move over time, so that mechanism over time wouldn’t provide more revenue.”

Lynch said there were no movements being made to increase the total program and if they wanted to do that, they’d need to do a mill levy override with voter approval.