‘Everyone is shocked’: How Hillsborough officials nixed a teacher pay tax

It was supposed to be an unremarkable morning. Hillsborough Schools Superintendent Van Ayres would sit quietly in the audience as the County Commission placed two tax referendums on the November ballot.

“A pass-through,” Ayres would later call it.

They had expected the county commission to bless two measures: First, a renewal of the community investment sales tax for capital spending; then the school district’s proposed property tax to boost employee pay. They voted 6-0 to move their sales tax along.

Then the bottom fell out. Joshua Wostal, a business owner who won a seat on the county board in 2022, moved to postpone the property tax referendum until 2026. His measure passed 4-3.

School district leaders had not received any warning, they said. There had been numerous conversations with county commissioners about the sales tax, and what percentage of the money might be used to help build new schools. But not about the property tax, which the School Board approved in April.

And they needed the money. Pasco, Pinellas, Manatee and nearly all the state’s large school districts had similar taxes, which they used to pay starting teachers as much as $57,000 a year. Hillsborough was lagging behind at $48,000.

Days later, educators as far as Tallahassee are wondering how Wostal’s gambit happened. All four yes votes were cast by Republicans. Was this a partisan power play? Was it legal? And if it does not survive a likely lawsuit, what will become of a district that is already short 500 teachers?

“Everyone seems shocked by it because it’s not normal,” said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, the umbrella group for teachers unions. “If there is a play here, I don’t know what it is. Maybe to set a precedent? To come after public schools? To come after people who work in public schools?”

Competing school, county agendas

Wostal and commission chairperson Ken Hagan said Wednesday they were postponing the referendum because they didn’t want to burden constituents already suffering from rising housing costs.

But in the months leading up to the vote, there was another concern.

County leaders wanted to ensure that the sales tax would survive the election so they could continue to build parks, fire stations and other public facilities. They could have waited, as the existing tax sunsets in 2026. Instead, then-commissioner Michael Owen tried to cut a deal with Ayres: Back off plans for the property tax, and Owen could vote for the sales tax to continue to benefit schools.

Ayres stood firm. Ultimately, county leaders cut the schools’ share of sales tax proceeds from 25% to 5%.

Behind the scenes, organizations including the teachers’ union and PTA council were looking ahead to a campaign that would begin after the Aug. 20 primary elections, in which four school board members were trying to hold onto their seats.

Might the backers have protected their cause by starting the campaign earlier?

They didn’t think they needed to. And an early campaign did not make logical sense.

“You don’t get votes in April, May and June,” said Melissa Erickson, who runs an organization that helps high school students meet their graduation goals, and worked on a successful school sales tax campaign in 2018. “The time you get parents talking about school is when when kids are in school.”

Erickson and other advocates wondered how Wostal, Hagan, Christine Miller and Donna Cameron Cepeda could put one tax on the ballot, then block the other out of concern for their constituents’ living costs.

They noted other contradictions, such as parental rights being a rallying cry for Republican leaders.

“Shouldn’t parents have a choice to pass a tax to invest in their schools?” Erickson asked.

As news sets in, a call to action

After calling schools board members on the two-block walk back to district headquarters, Ayres assembled his executive team to begin discussing legal strategies. They notified the local teachers’ union and the Hillsborough Education Foundation, who called on their supporters to join Ayres at a hastily assembled news conference.

Letters went out to parents and staff.

“With more than 23,000 employees, including 13,000 teachers, more than 200,000 students and all their parents, it is puzzling to all of us in the district as to why the County Commission is not allowing voters to have a choice to vote on the millage,” Ayres wrote. “I want to ensure voters in Hillsborough County have their voices heard.”

The union and education foundation urged their supporters to contact county commissioners, who meet next on Aug. 7. Music teacher Cristina Johnson wrote on Facebook: “I sent a message that details how much I’m spending on a 1-bedroom apartment compared to my salary in Hillsborough. It’s between 60-70%.”

Two county commissioners who voted with Wostal are on the ballot in August: Hagan, first elected in 2002; and Miller, who Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed in June after Owen resigned to run for the legislature.

An aide to Hagan said he was out of town Friday and not available for an interview.

Wostal told the Tampa Bay Times he was “just against property taxes in general.” Responding to Ayres’ remarks at the news conference, he said. “I guess I will take a lecture from a bureaucrat that makes a third of a million dollars a year of people’s taxes decrying us delaying them even more as a badge or honor.”

If a lawsuit comes, what then?

On Tuesday, Ayres will ask for school board approval to pursue legal action that would force the county commission to send the tax question to the Supervisor of Elections. They have an Aug. 20 deadline to get it onto the November ballot.

It’s not clear how much this court action might cost. And, as Spar noted, “we will have one tax-paid entity, the school board, suing another. Taxpayers are paying both sides.”

The question has been raised before. In 2020, the Indian River County Commission attempted to place the school district’s property tax referendum on the November ballot instead of the August one, as the school board wanted.

Indian River Circuit Judge Janet Croom determined the commission had acted outside the law, which states that, after adopting a millage rate referendum, a school board “shall direct the county commissioners to call an election.” The law is in the Florida education code and does not address any authority of commissioners, Croom wrote.

Under that law, she wrote, “commissioners have no discretion to choose a different date, but must perform the ministerial act of calling for an election as directed by the School Board, including the date requested.”

That case differed from a 2019 Clay County case, where a judge found the commission could change the date of a sales tax referendum, which is governed under a separate law.

Andrea Messina, executive director of the Florida School Boards Association, said school board members across Florida have their eyes on the latest events in Hillsborough.

“They would like it settled one way or another,” she said.

The Hillsborough situation stands in direct contrast to Pinellas, where school supporters are asking voters to double their longtime tax from 50 cents to $1 per $1,000 of assessed value.

The Pinellas County commission, which also has a Republican majority, “didn’t even ponder the merit of it,” said political consultant Beth Rawlins, who has led the Pinellas referendum campaigns since 2004. “They didn’t see that as their role.”

Not only that: The Pinellas School Board endorsed this year’s referendum unanimously, even though members Dawn Peters and Stephanie Meyer, both Republican, were apprehensive about raising taxes. The two said they wanted voters to be able to decide the question.

In Hillsborough, Republican school board members Stacy Hahn and Patti Rendon have said they do not support the property tax measure, and they cast dissenting votes in April when the board approved it.

Rendon said Friday that she continues to believe that “there is more money in our budget that we should be putting toward teacher salaries.” Looking ahead to Tuesday, she said she does not want to see the district legal fees for a losing case, and she is doing her own legal research.

“It’s a question of, did they (the county commission) have the authority to do what they did,” she said.

Not long ago, Hillsborough district and teachers union leaders celebrated an unusually early conclusion to their annual salary negotiations. Those new pay schedules are not in danger, district spokeswoman Tanya Arja said.

“This is not about balancing our budget,” Arja said. “This is about more money to pay the teachers so we are competitive with other districts.”