St. Charles voters unkind to tax hike requests

Whether it's life and death or just to build new schools, now is simply not the time to ask for more money.

That seemed to be the message behind the rejection of both St. Charles Unit District 303's referendum and the St. Charles Countryside Fire Protection District questions Tuesday night.

A successful school referendum would've meant rebuilding or renovating all three middle schools in the district plus Davis Elementary School in a borrowing tactic that would've kept the district's tax rate flat, but also prevented the tax rate from shrinking.

Unofficial results saw voters rejected the school request by 561 votes with all 46 precincts reporting. Voters in DuPage County actually voted in favor the district's question by a slim margin.

Superintendent Don Schlomann said the district is probably at least two years away from trying again. The summit process left staff with at least that much work to do in program changes to special education and course structure to occupy them. Schlomann said he still believes in the summit process and results, but understands that process began before the economy took a nosedive.

"It's clear to me that our community is not immune to the effects of the economy," Schlomann said. "We just had the best poll that we could have. We didn't pare the request down enough."

Meanwhile, the St. Charles Countryside Fire Protection District saw its dreams of building a new firehouse to improve fire and medical response times vaporized.

In contrast to the school referendum, the fire protection district's question actually would've directly resulted in a higher tax bill for residents. Those who voted "yes" might have sympathized more with the life or death message behind the firehouse question than they did with the idea of new schools improving education theory of the District 300 question, but the effort failed anyway.

Unofficial results saw both questions the fire protection district ask fail with all 26 precincts reporting. The question for more operating funds failed by 810 votes. Meanwhile, voters rejected the notion of borrowing money to build a new firehouse by only 218 votes.