School tax, Sunday liquor in Fayetteville OK’d

Fayette County voters narrowly approved a tax in Tuesday’s elections that is designed to help keep their schools among the state’s best.

With all precincts reporting as of late Tuesday evening, the special purpose local option sales tax, or education SPLOST, had passed by 1,210 votes, claiming better than 51 percent (28,913) of the vote to outdistance the nearly 49 percent (27,713) of those who voted against it.

The 1 percent sales tax, which will take effect on April 1, 2009 is expected to generate up to $115 million over the next five years. It means that for every $100 spent in Fayette County, $1 would go towards E-SPLOST.

The referendum was just one of the evening’s few hotly contested races throughout the county.

In Fayetteville, voters approved a measure that will allow Sunday sales of alcoholic beverages by the drink. Peachtree City voters rejected a proposed recreation bond, with more than 62 percent saying no.

The results won’t become official until Friday as provisional ballots and military ones are tallied.

School officials, citing large state cuts in funding, voted to add the SPLOST referendum to the ballot in August. Without the additional revenue, they said they would have been forced into drastic system-wide cuts that could have adversely affected Fayette’s standing as one of the state’s best school systems.

Under the terms of the E-SPLOST, the money raised could only be used to pay down existing debt on school bonds, build, renovate and repair schools and underwrite technology, buses, textbooks, safety, security and maintenance.

Critics had decried the need for additional taxes, saying the school system should make do like everybody else. Others questioned the announcement’s timing, less than a month after three school board members had been up for re-election in July’s primaries.

Fayette County voters had rejected SPLOST initiatives in 1998 and 1999, but passed education bonds in 2001 and 2004.

The county had been currently just one of three in the state that do not have an E-SPLOST.

In other election news, incumbent Post 1 school board member Janet Smola soundly defeated write-in challenger Nicole File by winning more than 88 percent of the vote.