Mayor disappointed in Dist. 300 board

A vacationing Mayor Guy Alongi said in a telephone conversation Tuesday afternoon he is disappointed in the Du Quoin Community Unit District 300's tabling of the city's request for $125,000 from the schools to help renovate the Du Quoin swimming pool.

It is the summer home to the Swimming Indians and to dozens of school children.

Alongi said even if the numbers didn't come down on the side of the city--and, they do--they certainly come down on the side of the taxpayers.

And, here are only some of the numbers. District 300 takes over 70 percent of the real estate tax revenues from the local share of the bill. Between the half-cent sales tax which voters approved in 2006 for paying off the local share of bond indebtedness on the high school and the more recent one percent facilities tax (which passed everywhere in the county EXCEPT in Du Quoin) the schools now get over 20 percent of all sales tax revenues.

The 2006 intergovernmental agreement which allows the half-cent sales tax to be collected was designed to generate $28,000 to $30,000 a month, but instead is generating closer to $40,000 a month and apparently that surplus is not going into a set-aside fund that could generate the four annual $30,000-plus payments to help with the pool repairs.

On the same subject, Du Quoin has already collected enough sales tax to pay off $2.8 million of what started out as a local bonding share of $3.5 million. Instead, an addendum to the 2006 agreement provided for a slush fund to pay off Ward and Wheatley School demolition debt and other expenses with no real accounting to the city on the district's part.

Lastly, that addendum requires the school district to rebate $565,000 of that sales tax money to the city somewhere in its 20-year life of the agreement. The city is only asking for $125,000. At every turn, the taxpayers have been there for Dist. 300 without taking so much as one pencil away from a child. "The thing that disappoints me is that the board is misinformed," said Alongi. "The people elected me to find every revenue stream. I don't have any stomach for raising taxes to fix this pool," Alongi adds.

"I am going to ask that our attorney Aaron Atkins, Supt. Gary Kelly and the school's attorney Jerry Smith, sit down and try to work this out."