Voters reject Cy-Fair ISD funding measures

But I do want to get out to some of the residual effects of what we saw there on election night, right? That's why you go to the polls and that's why you vote, because you want to see change one way or the other. And for folks inside Fair ISD, they were faced with a question. Would you be willing to support a bond for 1.6 billion dollars here to make some changes? And they said no. So let's go to Sacra Gray. Sacra, tell us here, what is the plan here? Because this was no across the The board and all of these ballot measures... Yeah, it was an overwhelming no from voters. So now SciFair ISD leadership has to go back to the drawing board. So if you think about it, 200,000 people or nearly 200,000 people cast their vote. And with that, the overwhelming no means that district leaders will have to figure out a way to make the dollar stretch moving forward. When we asked the big The question of why did people vote no, it boils down to ultimately property taxes. So according to the district, if all five propositions passed, homeowners would have seen a net 9 cent property tax rate hike. On the ballot under Texas law, every single bond proposition is required to have the warning that explicitly says this is a property tax increase. Voters saw that warning at a time when their household budgets are already strained. It was really a bad year for Ryan to try to get them passed. You had a blue wave driven in part by concerns about affordability and concerns about the economy. That's not a good population to be asked to increase the amount that they pay in property taxes, taxes that they already believe are too high. Here's what voters said no to, Proposition A was the tax rate increase. The district wanted that money for daily operating costs as they stare down an $80 million deficit. The other four propositions were capital bonds totaling $1.6 billion, which would have paid for new school buses, classroom laptops, safety gear, roof repairs, and stadium upgrades. Now, without that money in, ultimately what comes next is SyFair ISD will have to come up with a new financial plan as they go into next year. Back to you.