Sycamore School District 427 to levy $36.4M for 2020-21 school year

SYCAMORE – Sycamore homeowners can expect to pay about the same to Sycamore schools on their property tax bill, according to the proposed district tax levy.

Nicole Stuckert, assistant superintendent for business services for Sycamore School District 427, said the owner of a home valued at $200,000 will pay $4,083 for the school district portion of their property tax bill, about $5 less than the previous year.

“This is the largest source of revenue for the district, as it is for a lot of school districts around our area,” she said.

Stuckert said the tax levy will help pay for district expenditures – including programs, services, operating costs and salaries – for the 2020-21 school year. She said the majority of the district is residential property.

“It’s heavily residential at 73%,” Stuckert said at Tuesday’s meeting of the district board. “We have about 15% commercial, 4.4% industrial, and we do have 7% in farm valuations.”

Stuckert said the board must adopt a levy before the last Tuesday in December and that the adoption has to be certified with both DeKalb and Kane counties – the two counties in which the district is located.

She said the district gets two large payments, one in June and one in September, but smaller payments begin coming in as early as May.

“We do get small payments throughout the beginning of the year until November, which is usually our last payment,” Stuckert said.

Stuckert explained how the equalized assessed value of the district and the tax rate relate to one another to maintain the tax levy.

“If the existing EAV remains flat, the tax rate remains flat,” she said. “If the existing EAV is decreasing, the tax rate will increase. If the EAV increases, the tax rate will decrease.”

Stuckert said it’s very hard for homeowners to understand because when they see their property values decrease, the tax rate increases.

“We often tend to get a lot of phone calls at that time asking, ‘Why is my bill going up?’ and then if the EAV is increasing, the tax rate is actually decreasing,” she said. “This doesn’t mean your individual property taxes are actually going down. It’s all based on your home value.”

The total levy will increase about
$2 million over last year, to $36,435,636.

Stuckert said the 2019 tax rate went down slightly from 2018.

“It’s not a huge decrease, but it is a decrease,” she said.

Because the total levy increased more than 5% over last year, there will be a truth in taxation hearing before the board’s Nov. 26 meeting.