Jacksonville School District 117 officials lost $3 million in expected revenue in February month, putting the district’s finances on alert.
Superintendent Steve Ptacek says the answer lies with Personal Property Replacement Tax (PPRT) paid by the Illinois Department of Revenue: “We are looking at maybe getting 60% of what we got last year, and that’s $2.5 million. Plus, when you do throw in some other reductions in some transportation reimbursements – MCATs this year went from 80% normally to 70% – that’s reimbursables, special education reimbursables. When you throw all of that together, we are talking about a revenue loss of nearly $3 million, and if you add in a property tax revenue gain, it’s approximately $2.5 million. That’s concerning to have that big of a revenue loss at a time when CPI has been pretty high, so our salaries were increasing to match an increasing CPI and cost of living. Fortunately, we are in a very strong position with a very strong fund balance to weather the storm.”
Ptacek says the revenue loss will not affect the district moving forward on the new Murrayville-Woodson project.
PPRT had seen record aggregate revenues for school districts across the state in 2022 and 2023according to the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. Projections for last year showed a funding gap coming according to the state’s Evidence Base Funding Formula. Then, the Illinois Department of Revenue discovered it had miscalculated payments and now all school districts across the state are paying back a penalty due to the state’s own error.
Ptacek says IDOR has been less than transparent on the amount of penalty owed, when the penalty payments will stop, or even when the penalty payments began. He says the reduction in PPRT may be a new norm for school district revenue projections moving forward: “The entire CPPRT funds were overpaid. They didn’t tell us exactly how much. They said they were going to have to take some out to pay back that payment to put it into the proper fund where it was supposed to go. We have been asking for what percentage of our regular expected payments are going to be paid out to that [debt], what’s the length of time of the payment, and more. We have received no confirmation of any of our questions. No answers. In just this last week, to the Department of Revenue…this isn’t ISBE…this is the actual Department of Revenue who is in charge of CPPRT – we asked the question if they had any heads up or thoughts on what’s going to be happening for next year was our first question. Our second question was ‘Can you update us on the status of this repayment that we’ve been paying?’ All we got back from them was ‘We have no idea of what’s happening until August.’ There’s a major funding source for us that we won’t have any idea of what’s happening to it. The rumor mills are that they could get cut another 20%. We don’t know if that’s 20% on top of what we are regularly supposed to get and they’ve been taking out the penalty or whether that’s 20% of what we got this year. We have no idea.”
PPRT payments is allocated in accordance with a school district’s respective collections of Tangible Personal Property Tax revenue in either 1976 or 1977. The allocation formula has never been updated and is no longer representative of where businesses exist geographically in Illinois.