George Fuller, acting as a citizen, hosted a McKinney Area Democratic Club Q&A at his business in support of the incumbent MISD school board members up for re-election and the $200M airport bond. The video is here.
I’m adding context to several things he said.
1. (starting about 3:25) GF asserted that if the McKinney ISD school board members on the ballot are not re-elected, “…watch our school district go down in the tank and watch every company run for the hills.”
I’m sure he feels passionate about reelecting these incumbents,
but MISD already has a lower rating than the surrounding districts (B instead of A). The
district has also been slowly losing students since 2018, while surrounding ISDs
continue enrolling more students. Maybe companies have been running for a
while. Maybe their employees are choosing to be in other districts already.
Enrollments at MISD over the years
2. (about 7:00) GF says, “It [the airport] kicks off about $3.5M in taxes, property, school, college, and county. Does everyone know why it’s important to everyone in the room? That means if they’re paying $3.5M worth of taxes, we’re not.”
How? How are taxpayers getting that back? The city and MISD collected more in taxes this last year than the
previous year (even though the tax rate was lower due to property valuations
being higher). Additionally, the money brought in through the airport reinvestment zone (TIRZ) is not even part
of this calculation for the city. How does that fit in?
City of McKinney
3. (at about 14:00) GF says, “The FAA has reviewed and put out a first draft that they [garbled]…first open house, the second on April 19th, but they look at what’s the impact on water, wildlife, air quality, ground transportation…”
This statement is not correct. It is also misleading. The FAA is not performing this environmental assessment. McKinney Airport’s engineering firm of
record, Garver, is performing the study that is still ongoing. According to the
timeline given by Garver and all city information, the FAA has not gotten the
preliminary report yet.
These two open houses GF talked about are hosted by Garver
and the city. They are only open houses. Public hearings are required for public input, and those will not be completed until AFTER the bond election. The FAA is
supposed to review the findings after the bond election too.
Here’s the city's explanation of the process:
Click here to see it on the city website.
No comments:
Post a Comment