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Safety Tax fails again

Posted April 03, 2017 11:00 pm

By Pete Spitler Editor@heraldtrib.com

Roughly five months after being voted down in the November general election, Randolph County's Public Safety Tax referendum was rejected again in Tuesday's consolidated election.

This time, after several public outreach meetings in February and a speaking tour by the county commissioners last month, the tax failed by 64.9 percent of the vote.

In November, the PST was defeated by 67 percent of the vote, with turnout being helped by the surge in interest created by an abnormal presidential election year.

Five months later, and with no big names at the top of the ticket, only 20 percent of the county's 21,688 registered voters went to the polls.

"We knew (turnout) wasn't going to be high," said Randolph County Board Chairman Ronnie White on Tuesday night after the results were announced. "We were hoping that educating people more about where the county was financially would produce a better result, but the people have spoken and we'll have to work with what we have."

White also stated that he has been in contact with several economic development officials about developing plans that would benefit the entire region.

If it was approved, the PST would have increased local sales taxes by 1 percent, meaning consumers would have paid an additional $1 for every $100 of tangible personal property bought at retail.

Not subject to the tax would have been personal property that is titled or registered with an agency of state government, food for human consumption that is to be consumed off the premises where it is sold (other than alcoholic beverages, soft drinks and food that has been prepared for immediate consumption) and non-prescription medicines, drugs, medical appliances and insulin, urine testing materials, syringes and needles used by diabetics.

Under the referendum, 75 cents of every $1 generated by the sales tax would go toward the operations of the sheriff's office, with the funds generated by the remaining 25 cents distributed to local public safety agencies based upon each city or village's population.

The commissioners estimated the tax could have generated $2.8 million per year. For any revenues after $2 million, the percentages would flip, with the greater percentage being divided up among the municipalities.

Distribution of the county's sales tax revenue was being based off of the 2010 census, which would mean Chester - with its population adjusted to 4,786 to account for the 3,800 persons housed in Menard Correctional Center and the Chester Mental Health Center - would have conceivably received the highest distribution of the nearly $720,000 generated at $171,610.38.

Sparta ($154,255.71), Red Bud ($132,598.24), Steeleville ($74,689.60) and Percy ($34,781.04) rounded out the top five communities on a list the commissioners distributed to local media outlining the theoretical distribution amounts.

But during discussions with various agencies, the commissioners encountered some problems - including fire districts that overlap and a sales tax rate for the City of Sparta that would make it the highest in southern Illinois south of Springfield at 9.25 percent.

The commissioners had been set to approve a resolution at their March 24 meeting - the last before the election - to establish formal distribution of the potential PST funds, but media covering the meeting were told it wasn't ready at the time.

The tax was conceived by the commissioners as an answer for declining coal sales tax revenue, with the county losing more than $1 million in sales tax receipts from 2012 to 2016.

"Our first responders, our whole county, nobody has a full-time fire department, although we have a full-time EMS," said Steeleville Village Board Trustee Tim Eichenseer, who won re-election Tuesday. "I hope it would have passed because that lost revenue has to be found somewhere because we need our first responders.

"There's a shortage of funding for that and I really hope the county board of commissioners can come up with some alternative ideas to come up with these funds because we don't want to lose our first responders and their ability to respond in an emergency."

In the past five years, the number of people employed by the county in the sheriff's office, health department and county highway department has been reduced by 34.

The sheriff's office has only eight full-time deputies, while neighboring Monroe County has 16 and less area to patrol.

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