001Good afternoon everyone. Today is September 24th, 2025. It is 6 pm. We are at the multi-purpose center. We have Miss Paty Ramirez um Miss Paty Garcia present. Mr. Jesse Solis present. Mr. Renee Pñena present. And our superintendent Guadalupe Garcia present. And our attorney uh Mr. present. The purpose of this meeting is to present and discuss the following. Number one, voter approval, tax ratification, election. Number two, public comments. And then we will close. >> Madame President, members of the board, Miss Gara, superintendent of schools and uh our community, we are here. Uh again, my name is Marin Lopez and uh I will be presenting on the TR along with Dr. Salenas. So to talk about the tax ratification, I'm going to bounce back and forth to this current one and to the one that we had
002two years ago. So two years ago, this district had a tax ratification election and it did not pass. So in talking to employees, the biggest concern that they had about the tax ratification election from two years ago was that there was no no direction. There was nothing being told to them besides that first year. And in a tax ratification election, if approved, we end up getting millions every year from the state. So the first year employees would receive a stipend, but that's about as far as they knew that was coming. A stipen. the first year they did not know what they would receive if anything the second year the third year the fifth year the 10th year so again that's what we heard in terms of feedback uh on the on the last uh tax
003election so coming to this tax election again and and again I am the one that is running the election so I want to say this before I continue that one thing about running the election and one thing on presenting on the tax ratification to the community to campuses to departments. We're not here to be for or against the election. All we are here to do is to provide facts in regards of if it is approved. this is what employees will receive and if it is approved as a taxpayer if anything this is what you're looking to pay. So again, that's basically what we have been look when we go to the campuses, that's what we're focusing on is we're wanting to leave there and employees to be able to tell us, you know what, okay,
004I know what I will receive and I know what impact, if any, it will have on me personally and my family. So that's basically what our objective is when we've been visiting these campuses. So the thing where we start off with is we tell our employees we are also community members. I go to HB, I go to Walmart, I'm out there in the community and I get questioned by the community and some of the community members, they make it clear we don't want to pay more taxes. So again, I understand that some are my friends, some are my family, some people I don't know, but they recognize me and they bring that up. I understand that. But then we have this other side where we have 1,800 employees that, and that's what I tell the
005community, we have 1,800 employees that if we say, you know what, we don't want to do this. We don't want to uh you know look at the taxes. We don't want to confront the possibility of these things happening. So we're not going to do anything. Well, if our 1,800 employees were to find out, you know what, there was a possibility that we could have got this and got that and it didn't go up for a vote. So again, we have two sides that we're listening to and again, two sides, our taxpayers and our employees. So what we tell everybody when we go and present this is not a board this is not an administration that we're saying we are raising your taxes. It will be the voters that will decide if you know what approved
006the taxes will go up this amount. If not approved again we will stay where the taxes were going to be anyway. So we are being very clear with that that it will be up to the voters to decide. So what are we looking at in terms of employees? It's going to be very simple and the reason I explained two years back as to there was a lot of confusion because after the first year our employees didn't know what was going to happen with the money. Well, this time around we have new administration, we have new board. So when we met with our superintendent, Miss Gara, and she met with her cabinet, it was very very clear when we came to the decision of which route we were going to go. Now, what do we need
007as a district? We need a lot of things. You know, we need a fixed HVAC. We need a fixed buildings. We need buses. So there was a lot of things on the table that were discussed but at the end of the day we kept coming back to the same thing. We kept coming back to the same thing the same word retention retention. Retention. So we wanted to make sure that our employees were taken care of. We were getting tired of Roma. And with all due respect to Roma, I mean, they they see we have great teachers. They're taking our teachers. La Hoya, the valley, they're taking our teachers. Our maintenance department leaving out west to get better paying jobs. Other employees doing the same thing. So we kept going back to that word retention. When
008I was talking to those community members, family, friends, I asked them a question. Be honest with me. What do you think of your teachers? Of your child's teachers. Oh, we love them. My son comes happy every day from school. My daughter comes happy every day from school. Again, credit to principles. Credit to the teachers, credit to secretaries, maintenance, cafeteria. So that that is again what we try and tell the community. We're trying to retain our staff, our employees. So we came up with if you are a salaried sal you have a salary as an employee you make a salary you will be getting if the TR passes you will get a $3,000 raise. So again, we've been asked at campuses, okay, what some are confused raise with with a stipen. A stipen is a one-time
009payment. A raise, if you're 25 years old and you're going to be here for another 20, 30 years, you're that $3,000 is going to be with you for those 20 25 years. So, anyone with a salary, and this goes across the board, whatever your position and title is, if you have a salary, it will be $3,000 raise. If you are an hourly employee, again, secretaries, maintenance, transportation, cafeteria, on and on, it will be a $2 an hour raise. So, when we're explaining the raises, very simple. If you're on a salary, you add 3,000 to your salary. On an hourly employee, a little harder to explain. It's simple to to explain because you add up, you know, if you're at $8 an hour and you multiply that times two, it's $16 more a day. And if
010you're working 226, then you do that. You do the 8 time 2 is 16 times 226. So it ends up being a little over 3,600. I'm not going to get into the details of every every hourly employee because we have over 18 different types of hourly employees. We have hourly employees that work seven hours a day, but they work 183 days. There's some that work 180, 194, 192, 197. Same thing with the eight hour employees. They they some work 226. Some work 222. So again, for every employee that is interested, again, your hourly rate times 2 times the amount of days you work in the year. And that will be uh again your raise if this TR uh is passed. So again to be very clear what you're going to see here uh with Dr.
011Salena's presenting the slides again it's facts. We're trying to get the information out there and again what we want and what we're asking every campus principal. All we're asking and we're saying it in front of all the staff. We just want our staff to go out there and exercise their right to vote. How you vote, that is your decision. That's your personal decision. All we're asking is exercise and give them the opportunity to go and vote. So again, one other thing before I pass it on to Dr. Salenas. With this election here, I have no idea where this thing is going to end up. I have no idea. I'm not even going to guess if for or against is going to win. But one thing that we do feel very very confident that is going
012to pass and this is here in our county election in November and it's across the state of Texas uh at all the counties is our homestead extension exemption sorry right now it is at a 100,000 after November we feel very confident that it will be at 140. So, what does that mean? If you have a $150,000 house right now as it is, you get the first exemption up to a h 100,000. You pay taxes on 50. After November 150,000 uh house, the exemption is going to be 140. You're going to pay 10,000 of taxes. So, the presentation that you're going to hear from Dr. Salenas is on the assumption that those 140,000 which again we feel very very confident that it will pass in November. So I will pass it over to Dr. Salenas. >>
013Mr. Mining before you step off um this is what you're doing going to every school. Um I just want to clarify was done last year when they proposed that other uh tax revolution. Correct. It >> it was done it was done two years ago. Yeah. We every time our district has a well pretty much every district when they have things like this you that's how you kind of go you go to the departments you go to the campuses and you do a presentation to the community. So yes yes it was done. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Good evening madam president members of the board superintendent schools Miss GarcA and to entire RGCGISD community. Uh today's presentation we have an three objectives and they're all interconnected obviously and the first one is to give you a
014fundamental uh breakdown of our public school finance and that's really important because it sets the tone for what we feel is the focal point of this voter approval tax ratification election which we'll refer to Vader from now on just for time purposes. what is the what is the impact on Vader on in on revenue for the district and what is the impact of Vader on the taxes of our taxpaying community. So those are three objectives we'll be focusing on today and of course we'll open it up for questions for our community and for our school board. Now every scent that comes into the district is broken up into two major accounts. The maintenance and operations fund and the interest in syncing. And the maintenance and operations fund is your just as it states, it's day-to-day
015operations, pay the bills, payroll, uh, carpets, curtains, travel, buses, whatever it is to get the district to operate on a daily basis, comes from our maintenance and operations fund. The interest in syncing, which we'll refer to the INS fund, that is to pay our bond loan and principal and interest through the INS side. So, you have your maintenance and operations and you have your interest in syncing. the maintenance and operations in a minute in the next couple slides you're going to see it's broken up into tier one and tier two interest and syncing it's just interest and syncing to make our bond principal projects. So with that being said, before we move to the next slide, we want to make something very clear. When we began this project, we we heard about a 15cent increase
016versus the 875. The 0875 is what we're proposing with the copper pennies, which I'll get to in a minute. But why 15 cents? You pay attention to the 2025 school year. At the bottom of the slide, you see the interest in syncing fund from 4629 increasing in 2026 for 5347. That's a seven-cent increase that was approved by the voters with the bond project that needs to be levied to pay the bond principal. Okay. You look at the M in 2025, you have a 6994 and 2026, it's 7807. That is a 0875 that we're proposing with the copper pennies. At the end, you see the increase of 116 to 131. That's where the 15 cents is. So again, that's the INS increase through the bond project principal payments and the M is the proposed Vader election.
017So in tier one, the way we look at tier one, we talked about maintenance and operations and we talked about interest and syncing. We're going to forget about interest and syncings. We're not talking about bond payments right now. M is your maintenance and operation broken up into two. We talked about tier one and tier two. In this slide, you see tier one. This is the think of a designated amount by the state of Texas to educate a child. This is what the state of Texas says. This is what's the fund that's going to be available per pupil. And of course, you come in with weighted ADA, which I'll talk about in a minute. You have to levy taxes from your from your community, the M. If those taxes in a in a school district that
018the property values are lower than a school district where the property rates are higher, 1 cent will levy less than a property rich school district. So you may not reach the designated amount per pupil by taxing the M in your local properties. So what happens at that point? The state kicks in with state aid. Okay. So that is tier one funding. It's a designated amount and inversely proportional. If a if a school district is property rich and goes above the designated amount, then that's where the state takes those funds and spreads them out throughout the state. Okay? So we want to make that clear. Tier one is a designated amount and that's what we're not focusing on today is just to let you know how that works. This is a a flowchart just to keep
019in mind maintenance and operations. We talked about tier one funding. We talked about the designated amount. We tax the local entity M. If you reach the designated amount, you go past it, take funds get taken away. If you're under it, they're state aid. Okay? We are in the state aid situation. You look on the right hand side, you have tier 2 funding. This is what we're going to call enrichment funding moving forward. Enrichment funding is above tier one funding. Okay. And tier two contains eight golden pennies which we'll briefly talk about right now and the nine copper which is the focus of the Vader election. So tier two just a little quick story. Dr. Los Santos I know he was our professor at for a lot of us at Pan-American. He's now our financial adviser
020and he was a superintendent of schools uh for several districts but he told us a little story in the 90s. Dr. Los Santos attended a a superintendence meeting with at the time Lieutenant Governor William Hobby in the '90s and they were talking about what can we do funding above tier one. Remember tier one's designated amount. What can we do above tier one funding? And they started, you know, throwing ideas back and forth. One quote that stood with us when he mentioned this is Lieutenant Governor Hobby says, "If your property poor and you want to do anything about it, then don't. But if your property values are poor and you want to do something about it, then go to the voters to levy those golden and copper pennies. Hence, give you the tier 2 funding. Now,
021tier 2 copper pennies, we talked about the golden pennies. I mentioned in the previous slides, I'll just go back real quick. So, you can see there's eight golden pennies that are allotted for because I got you a little history. This district did acquire the 17 cents because if you take the eight golden pennies available and they have their whole funding formula we're not going to talk about right now and the nine copper pennies available. 9 and 8 is 17. So there's 17 cents above tier one that's available. The district had it at one point 117. However, state of Texas recaptured lowered property uh taxes and that's where the copper pennies were lost. So that explains why there's there's supposed to be nine. However, we said there's 875 available. There's 0875 available because 0.25 remained on
022the table on the tier 2. Okay. The copper pennies enrichment funds we mentioned again 875 are available. And why is copper why are the copper pennies what do they bring to the table? The copper pennies bring $49.72 per weighted ADA. Okay, that's available in tier 2 copper pennies. And again there's 0875 available. So what does this mean? If you take the copper penny value 4972 at tier 2 and we have a weighted ADA of 13,353 and at that point I want to stop. We can clearly say we don't we do not have 13,353 children enrolled in the district. Our enrollment is about 9200. So that weighted ADA, if Arcadio Selenas is enrolled in RGCGSD and he's a CTE student or he's bilingual, ESL in sped, then he weighs the ADA for that student weighs more
023than any other student not enrolled in that. So our weighted ADA coming from our financial advisor as of August 27th is 13,353. So again, the copper two pennies 4972 per student times the 13,353 weighted ADA for our district and the Vader cents that are available in the copper at 0875 at a $100 valuation is a revenue of $5.8 million. Now the breakdown the 5.8 8 in revenue. Okay. At the copper 2 0 the 0875. I want to make something very clear to all our voters who decide to exercise their right to vote it when they go to the ballot box on the ballot you will see a number of 3,819,211. You can say wait a minute you just said it was 5.8. The reason that the five the 3.8 A 9211 will be on the
024ballot because that specifies the collected maintenance and operations and interest in syncing funds above last year's total at a 91% collection rate. That has to be on the ballot. Okay. So, we want to be clear about that. Again, the 3,819211 is a revenue above last year's if Vader approved for maintenance and operations, interest and syncing together at a 91% collection rate. Okay. 1.5 from the RGCGISD tax community, 4.2 or about 73% from the state of Texas. So, we covered objective number two is what's the revenue impact on Vader? Okay, next objective. What is the impact that the taxpayers, the people we serve, obviously we serve our children, but the taxpayers we serve in our district, Mr. Lopez mentioned it. Every slide, the next couple of slides are with the assumption that there's $140,000 homestead exemption.
025Okay, with that is assumption, we will move forward in the next slides. If you look at the left column, you see $100,000. That's zero across the board. No taxes. Why? Current law has it 100,000. So that doesn't change. You look at the next number 122494. The reason that number is there is because that's the average homestead value in our district. That is zero across the board. Again, with the $140,000 exemption assumption. Look at 150. 150 minus140 is a $10,000. $10,000 are taxable. That is 1531. $15.31 a year. About$128 a month. Board, I respectfully give you 30 seconds to scan that code and put your property values. And on the left column, you'll see, and anybody in the in the crowd willing to do that in attendance today, you can scan that code. You can input
026your property values. It'll give you the left column with Vader and without Vader. You can see the difference. And if you don't know your property values, then this sheet is available for the entire community. Our principles will have this sheet and upon request of our employees will be emailed to them. On the left column, if you're following me, you see a $5,000 mark. That's with the $140,000 exemption. So this property is not $5,000. This property is $145,000. We subtracted the 140 exemption. That gives you a nonvader non-approved Vader of 61.40 approved Vader 6577 giving you a difference of $4.37. A lot of our community members came back and said, "Well, I want to know the difference between last year and if Vader approved." That's on the far right, $7.65 for this home right here. This
027sheet is available from 5,000, I believe, all the way to 700,000. So, that's available. It's easy breakdown. And again for our community on the lefth hand side you have $5,000 which is $145,000 uh property without Vader 61.40 a year with Vader 6577 total difference of $437 last year to this year gives you $7.65. We also want to provide resources for our employees and we're allowing our employees and of course to our community. If you don't know if you have your homestead exemption, please contact the the appraisal district. Make sure that you have your homestead exemption. Make sure you have your your information said. I know I went through a couple years ago. I didn't have my information correct. Make sure you have that. These are the people to contact on 3167. So, we've already gone
028to the board and asked for a where if Bader approved, we put it part of our compensation plan. The board approved it in August. And to be clear again, Mr. Lopez is very clear about that. $3,000 raise for all salary employees. This is this is totally different from HB2 where you have teachers, nurses, librarians. No, all salary employees, $3,000 and above what the board's already approved in July. For hourly employees, it's a $2 raise. same thing across the board and in addition to the this all both these raises are in addition to a board approved raises in July also in and I'm going to use a teacher example it's probably the easiest example if Vader approved the elections in November then it'll take us about a month to process the paperwork get everything set let's
029use a teacher as an example teacher would receive a $3,000 raise that $3,000 let's say we're every employee in the district gets 24 payments okay 24 payments we're at payment 12. So that means you have 12 payments left. The $3,000 or the $2 per hour, whatever your your total is, would be divided into the remaining payments. So obviously an employee would see more this year and then next year would it would fizzle out to 24 payments. So why compensation? Mr. Lopez is very clear. Retention, retention, retention. The commissioner of education, Mike Morath, made it very clear. I want $100,000 teachers. I want $100,000 teachers in our classrooms. That's what he said at a TA conference. We set a goal as a district with our superintendent of schools at 2728. Well, we're happy to say as
030of September 9th, we have three and just to be clear with the public, their base salaries on the left column. And of course, you add the teacher incentive aotment on the right. We have three teachers over the $100,000 mark and four knocking on the door very closely. Hopefully, we met the objectives today for you, but also we've told our staff and our community, we also want to inform our our our administrators and our staff. We understand school electioneering and we know that we may not knowingly spend or authorize the spending of public funds for political advertising. We understand that we may not use public resources to advocate for or against. Next steps, we've been presented at every campus. we're we will present to our departments and now Mr. Lopez will give you some of the
031details on the upcoming dates for the election. Thank you Dr. Salenas. And again, you know, pretty simple, you know, we've we've been told by all the campuses that we've been at again that they leave knowing, okay, you know, very clear what are we going to get and then very clear go to your principal. If you didn't see your number there on your value of your home or you didn't find out till a week later, go to your principal. They will have that copy. they can email it to you and again you will know exactly and that's the purpose of us going and visiting every campus and every department and hopefully here with the with the community again trying to be very clear and have everybody know exactly how it will affect them and their family.
032So to finish off here we will have two sites for for the election. The two sites will be uh at the auditorium here at the fort and at the maintenance department right before you get to the new Guya Middle School behind the co-op. Those two sites will be used for early voting and for election day. Early voting starts on October the 20th. That first week of early voting from the 20th through the 24th, it will be from 8 to 5. On the second week of early voting, the first three days of the second week, the 27th through the 29th, again, 8 to 5. The last two days of early voting on October 30th and 31st, it will be from 7:00 a.m. to 700 p.m. and election day on November 4th from 7:00 a.m. to 700
033p.m. So that concludes our presentation. If you all have any questions, >> questions. Any questions? >> No, thank you. >> Okay, thank you.