This is an opinion piece. I will refer back to the title of the blog: Rants, Raves and Reality Checks. This is a little of each of those.
Fact: The town needs to urgently address the high school facility issue.
Fact: The town’s Board of Mayor and Aldermen (BMA) made a mistake.
“They” always say – don’t ask a question in open court when you don’t know what the answer will be. I’d like to modify that: Don’t ask a poorly phrased question that proposes an unfavorable suggestion with not enough context around it for the casual respondent to make a good decision.
According to the Commercial Appeal, the town’s administrator recommended that the ‘poll’ not be conducted until after the public meeting to inform the local citizenry. That would have made a lot of sense. And I would again add – you could have used a much better way to phrase the question.
And mailing a 1-question survey is not a (scientific) poll. It is amateur hour. It shows that our elected leaders are not that good at politics. Which is your silver lining right there.
A scientific poll asks well-constructed questions of a representative sample of the population. It should also take into account the status of the respondents: tax payer? voter? general demographics of the respondent?
Now the town finds itself in a pickle. The high school facility issue still needs to be addressed. Urgently. But now there is a degree of controversy about a poorly worded survey that was asked at the wrong time. And I bet the local media will eat it up!
I guess things are about to get interesting… No public vote is required for the BMA to act and raise the property tax rate ‘up to 38 cents.’ So what will they do? Act boldly? Something HAS to be done.
And I’d like to point out too: “a 38 cent increase in property taxes” is a meaningless and scary sounding phrase with no context. The median home price in Collierville is around $250,000. Those homeowners, to the best of my understanding, will pay approximately $200 per year (!) more in taxes. That’s less than $20 per month. And it would still leave Collierville taxes the lowest of all towns/cities in the county.
I don’t have all the answers… But I trust my elected school board and my elected Board of Mayor and Aldermen to make bold decisions that look at the long range benefit of the school system and my town. I have three children in elementary school. I own a ‘median-ish’ house in town. I have a lot at stake here. I’d hate for misinformation to get in the way of the right thing to do.