The Board of Education approved a resolution Thursday to place the ESPLOST-6 referendum on a Nov. 4 Bulloch County ballot. It would be for a five-year extension – which probably won’t begin until three years from now – of one of the county’s four existing local 1% sales taxes, which with the state’s 4% tax make the total here 8% on non-exempt items. Now, the Bulloch County Board of Commissioners is set to act Tuesday on an agreement that would place a referendum for a “ninth penny” sales tax called the FLOST on the same ballot.
That “Floating Local Option Sales Tax,” for which the city and town councils of Statesboro, Brooklet, Portal and Register are taking votes of their own on the intergovernmental agreement with the county, would generate revenue to replace a portion of property taxes for the county government and the cities and towns in exchange for a mandatory, partial rollback of their millage rates. If approved by voters Nov. 4, that new 1% sales tax would be collected beginning Jan. 1.
Meanwhile, Superintendent of Schools Charles Wilson and school board members have been talking about the renewal of ESPLOST, the Educational Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, for months. But one thing missing from some of the conversations, until made clear during the board’s Aug. 14 evening regular meeting, is just how far in advance a Nov. 4, 2025, referendum for the sixth five-year installment of the tax will be taking place before the proposed extension’s actual start date.
The current five-year ESPLOST, approved by Bulloch County voters in November 2022 and the fifth such installment in the past two decades, will continue to be collected through September 2028 unless it first reaches its $110 million revenue cap, which appears unlikely. So the ESPLOST now headed for a Nov. 4, 2025 referendum and referred to as ESPLOST-6 would begin to be collected Oct. 1, 2028 and continue until Sept. 30, 2033, if approved by a majority of voters. Money from the current ESPLOST was already earmarked for construction of one added school, a new Southeast Bulloch High School. The cost estimate for that school, including athletic facilities, has risen to about $160 million to $170 million, surpassing the limit of the current tax.
The new Southeast Bulloch High remains key to a strategy to expand student capacity in its attendance zone by also converting the existing high school to house Southeast Bulloch Middle School and the existing middle school to be an upper elementary school with fourth and fifth grades.
By next summer, when Wilson and the board hope to see construction begin, the school system should have $50 million to $60 million saved up from the current ESPLOST-5 to start the work, he said in an interview Friday.
“We’re going to be in a position to begin the project, but we have to know we have the money from the next ESPLOST to finish the project, so we can’t start it until we know,” he said.
2025 ESPLOST Priority items
1. New SEBHS
2. Mobile Classrooms
3. Technology Infrastructure & Equipment
4. Curriculum & Instruction Materials & Software
5. School Nutrition Equipment
6. Facilities Renovations & Repairs
7. Transportation Fleet
8. School Furniture & Equipment
9. Land Purchases
$175M cap, $120M bonds
The resolution sets the revenue limit for proposed ESPLOST-6 at $175 million, an amount Wilson doesn’t expect will be reached. But it also authorizes a bond issuance or other debt of up to $120 million to complete the new high school and potentially other construction, to be repaid from the sales tax.
So, the new high school will also be the first priority, but not the only project, for proposed ESPLOST 6, as Wilson emphasized with his presentation. He displayed a numbered list of 12 “authorized projects” for the referendum, with only the first nine in bold print, as the priorities.
The first two were Number 1, the new SEBHS, and Number 2, mobile classrooms, which he notes may be needed at various schools to accommodate more students, at least until construction is completed.
Buses, technology, etc.
“Here’s probably something that seems to be foremost on a lot of people’s minds right now, and that is those other, remaining items in bold, those are all items that normally would be paid for out of the general fund,” Wilson said Friday. “We have transferred those things out of the general fund, over to the capital projects fund, to be paid for with sales tax dollars instead of property tax dollars.”
Actually, Number 9 on his list was “land purchases” for future construction, which he agreed wouldn’t necessarily become a general-fund item in the absence of ESPLOST.
But the other priority items, which the school district leadership in recent years has purchased using ESPLOST money instead of cash from the general fund, are these: Number 3. technology infrastructure and equipment, 4. curriculum and instructional materials and software, 5. school nutrition equipment, 6. facilities renovations and repairs, 7. transportation fleet (mainly school buses), and 8. school furniture and equipment.
“Now, if this ESPLOST doesn’t pass, we’re going to be left with about 2 mills worth of tax that now the general fund is going to have to pick up, which is going to back us into a corner of having to levy those two additional mills of tax to fund the things that the ESPLOST can no longer fund,” Wilson said. “That’s not a threat. It’s very much a matter of fact. … The ESPLOST benefits the property taxpayers of Bulloch County.”
The final three items on the list were not in bold print, and are of lower priority currently: Number 10. New schools for kindergarten through eighth grade, 11. a Statesboro High School multipurpose room and 12. a Portal Middle High School gym. He doubts there will be enough money left for these.
On a motion from board member Donna Clifton, seconded by member Jimmy “Jay” Cook, the school board approved the ESPLOST-6 resolution unanimously, 8-0.
County-city FLOST
Now, during their regular meeting that begins at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, the Bulloch County commissioners are slated to vote on an intergovernmental agreement creating a brand-new Floating, or “Flexible,” Local Option Sales Tax. This is unrelated to the ESPLOST, except that both sales tax referendums appear to be headed to the same ballot.
A 2024 Georgia law, enacted as House Bill 581, created multiple options for local property tax relief. One of these is a special “floating” homestead exemption that, after freezing the value of owner-occupied homes as assessed for taxes at 2024 levels through this year, will be followed next year and beyond by a provision limiting assessment increases to the inflation rate of the national Consumer Price Index.
Another key provision is the FLOST, available to counties where neither the county government nor any of the cities in that county opted out of the floating homestead exemption.
If approved by a majority of Bulloch voters in November, the additional 1% sales tax will take effect Jan. 1, 2026 and last for five years unless renewed. But as Chairman David Bennett of the Board of Commissioners explained in an interview, the revenue legally couldn’t be distributed to the cities or used by the county until July 1, 2027. So property taxpayers wouldn’t actually see the resulting millage rate rollback for more than a year, giving the local governments time to build the new revenue into their fiscal year 2027-28 budgets.
However, the FLOST rollback, unlike the homestead exemption, will apply to all types of taxable property.
Because it is meant to offset property taxes, the distribution of the FLOST revenue among the county and cities will be based on their previous year’s property tax collections as a share of the total property tax (not including school tax) collected by all of the local governments. Based on their 2024 property taxes and sales taxes as an example, the FLOST could provide a 39% rollback of each local government’s millage rate.
This will be explained further when the commissioners discuss and probably act on the FLOST agreement next week.
Bennett favors passage of the FLOST referendum.
“I personally hate property taxes,” he said. “I think property taxes are very regressive, and I think that this is a great way to offset the property taxes that people are paying right now.”
Wilson, who only recently learned that the first-time FLOST question may appear with the ESPLOST renewal on the Nov. 4 ballot, said it will be important for voters to understand the differences.
