By Mindy Ragan Wood
Staff Writer
The Piedmont Board of Education voted unanimously during a special session to join a lawsuit against the Oklahoma Tax Commission.
Members met early Tuesday morning to make the decision.
“Piedmont Public Schools, along with over 100 other Oklahoma Public School Districts, was notified in December, that future motor vehicle collections would be withheld and redistributed to other school districts as a result of a recent judgment regarding the apportionments (made) by the Oklahoma Tax Commission,” Superintendent James White said in a prepared statement. “This ruling will result in a loss of over $778,000 in funding for our district alone. This morning, we joined other affected districts in retaining legal counsel in order to ensure this process is examined and determined to be correct. We believe a precedent cannot be set that would result in further allocation mistakes for our state’s public schools.”
Board member Greg Duffy said it was an obvious choice to explore the possibility of relief.
“It should be heard quickly in court and we’ll know where we stand to go forward from there,” Duffy said. “The estimate was about $50,000 in legal fees to join other school districts in the lawsuit. Yesterday there were 10 schools who said they would participate and so that’s $5,000 for us to find out what our outlay would be. It was an easy decision.”
Yukon Public Schools is among districts who were overpaid and its board voted Monday night to join the legal fight. Yukon is scheduled to pay back $633,618.75.
Overpaid districts are not targeting underpaid schools.
“It is the contention of many districts (but) we don’t want to fight against any districts but we want to protect our own interests,” Superintendent Jason Simeroth said Monday night.
Simeroth told board members in conversations he had with other districts, the case would explore due process.
“We are discussing it to ask them to put it off to do a lot more research to see if we were fairly represented, if we had due process,” he said.
The OTC overpaid some districts and underpaid others after a new law changed the way motor vehicle taxes are appropriated to school districts. Several schools that were short changed sued the OTC in 2016 and a judge agreed that the agency misinterpreted the new law. In December 2018, the OTC informed districts it would deduct the difference in state funding for the next 13 months.
