Cobb school board member David Banks and two members of the district’s SPLOST advisory committee must be living in a bubble. They are proposing a new 1 percent sales tax for education in this county on top of the existing SPLOSTs for schools and transportation plus the state sales tax — which would raise the total sales tax to seven percent.
Banks is giving his support to the new tax effort led by John Crooks and Don Hill, members of the Facilities and Technology Committee of the school board. Crooks, a minister at Roswell Street Baptist Church, is a former school board member who got in a lot of hot water and escaped a recall after violating state law by failing to give advance notice of a vote on a cell tower, saying “it would have probably caused a circus.” Instead, it caused an uproar among his constituents. Hill is a former chairman of the Cobb Republican Party, an unlikely portfolio for a tax hike proposal.
The objective here is a hugely daunting one — amending the Georgia Constitution to allow the Cobb school district to impose a Local Education Sales Tax, or LEST. Crooks, who is president of the Cobb Schools Foundation, said he has been getting requests from teachers who want money to increase teacher training days, and thus, he decided to support the LEST proposal.
via The Marietta Daily Journal – New sales tax not likely to catch on for good reason.
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