House Bill 3(HB3) by the Texas Legislature is an attempt to increase funding and equity for districts with less resources and higher poverty rate such as ECISD where more than 60% of the students live in a home below the poverty line. HB3 1.040 amends the statute for previous years property values by redirecting funding to the basic allotment and now a $100k homestead exemption is applied for Texas ISD rate so the first $100k of value on your home is exempt from the property tax rate. Recapture calculations were amended to ensure that no district has funds recaptured below their entitlement based on the state formula(1.041, 1.018, 1.049).

There are some other changes that help protect property owners from tax increases such as the Board of Trustees is now required to do an efficiency audit before bringing a Tax Ratification Election(TRE)(1.001) and add language to the bond ballot stating ‘This is a property tax increase'(1.008) to make it more clear for the voters. There are also provisions that make the reinforcement of Maintenance and Operations funds(M&O) swapping with Interest and Sinking(I&S your bond debt) illegal(1.006, 1.007). This part is very important as this is what is being claimed in reference to ‘theft’ on the tax compression. The claim is that the boards of these districts across Texas did this in a deceitful way by not telling the public what they were doing but in reality a meeting was held, the public was notified, a presentation was done and live streamed, and the community had the opportunity to present public comment. This video here is from June 21, 2022 where item 13B was discussed to request approval of a resolution to calculate the property tax rate, the same process done every year.

The great thing about government entities requesting you to fund them through your taxpayer money is their budgets are usually available online and there is a large sense of transparency. In the example of Ector County  this PDF shows the slides presented in the budget presentation outlining how the district calculates the Voter Approved Tax Rate of $1.17792 that has been the same for now 5 years.

The compression of M&O is made on the basis of a predetermined equation that can sound complex but TEA has made publicly available an excel sheet of every districts calculations with a drop down to verify what certain districts did. There’s a lot of definitions in there that can be a bit confusing such as the Voter Approval Tax Rate, below highlights the definitions of each.

The State Comptroller also helps define how the M&O and I&S should be handled by the school district where they state ‘The school district’s current debt rate is then ADDED to equal the school district’s VOTER-APPROVAL RATE’ after using their equations for calculating the new M&O. ECISD took the guidelines provided by the Texas Legislature and the Texas Comptroller utilizing their formulas and worksheets to find the current tax rate that was voted on by citizens of the county.

Primarily due to lower Oil and Gas values, ECISD’s taxable assessed valuation dropped by more than $2.4 billion (17.5%) between 2014-15 and 2016-17. During that same period student enrollment increased to over 31,400 (2%). Today ECISD enrollment is more the 33,467 students.