Home Buyers May Face Innovative School Tax : Palmdale: Developers and school officials have struck a unique deal. Only those buying homes in the community would pay for new schools.

In an unusual deal that will be a breakthrough for school funding but a burden to home buyers, school officials and developers in Palmdale have agreed on a plan to impose a new schools tax on all future homes built in the fast-growing area.

Palmdale would become the only school district in Los Angeles County to collect such a levy, which would increase individual homeowner taxes by $400 to $500 a year at the start, according to school and finance officials.

The tax, if adopted as expected, would add from $15,000 to $20,000 in taxes on each home over 30 years. That is seven times as much money as is now raised by one-time fees on developers in the Palmdale School District, the most populous district in the Antelope Valley, with 18 schools and nearly 12,000 students. Enrollment is projected to nearly double to 21,000 students by 1995 alone.

The tax could fund an estimated $118 million worth of new and refurbished facilities over the next decade for the Palmdale School District, eventually providing for 15 new schools, the renovation of six others, and expansions of two more.

Some observers say the innovative tax plan shifts an inordinate tax burden for new schools onto the shoulders of future residents.

But because those future residents are not around to object, there were no cries of protest in Palmdale last week when school officials and developers announced they had reached an agreement to form a special district to impose the tax. It will be the developers, who own the land but won’t have to pay the tax, who have the power to approve it.

“We decided this would be the fairest thing to our community,” said Forrest McElroy, superintendent of the Palmdale School District. Current residents have already helped pay for existing schools, and it is new residents who are creating the need for more, he said.

“The guys like to talk about this being a new model for use by communities throughout the state,” said Jim Gilley, an official with the Antelope Valley Building Industry Assn., which represents most of the region’s major developers. Gilley called the proposal “a heck of a deal.”

Indeed, school and finance officials elsewhere said a major advantage of the plan, from the school district’s perspective, is that the tax does not have to be approved by the residents who will pay it.

School finance officials agreed the concept could become a model for other classroom-short school districts in high growth areas, provided they can persuade developers to go along. But school officials elsewhere in Los Angeles County have been unable to obtain such sweeping developer agreements.

In the nearby Lancaster School District, for example, school officials have been pushing a similar tax plan for months to no avail. Those talks broke down in a series of disputes before the two sides could agree on any specifics. Now, however, the developers say they will suggest Lancaster follow Palmdale’s approach.

School officials in the Santa Clarita Valley, a high-growth area like the Antelope Valley, couldn’t get developers to agree to the same district-wide tax several years ago, though such a tax has been imposed on a few housing tracts.

Clyde Smyth, superintendent of the William S. Hart Union High School District in the Santa Clarita area, called Palmdale’s accord “a great thing” for the area’s schools. But he noted that placing the burden entirely on future residents of a community raises questions.

“It’s the same old syndrome. People think, ‘I’m aboard. Pull up the ladder. Let’s let the new people pay for everything,’ ” said Smyth. “No matter how you slice it, new development ends up paying an inordinate amount.” And he said society increasingly is demanding that approach.

McElroy, meanwhile, insisted his tax proposal does not avoid current Palmdale area residents out of a fear they would not give the needed two-thirds approval in the required election. Instead, McElroy said, “I don’t believe double and triple taxing people is appropriate.”

The school board will be asked to approve the plan later this month, McElroy said. The owners of the vacant land in the district, largely developers, also would have to vote for the tax, something they are promising to do.

McElroy predicted that the tax could be in place and money could begin to flow into the district by the start of 1991. Like many school districts, Palmdale has been scrambling to find money for new campuses as state construction funds dwindle.

Under the tax proposal, new homes in the school district built in the first year would be charged 22 cents per square foot of development, or $440 for a typical 2,000-square-foot house. The tax rate would be adjusted for inflation and continue for up to 30 years.

McElroy said the tax will cover all of the vacant land in the school district permitted for residential development, about 5,000 acres inside the city and in nearby unincorporated areas. The area encompasses 7.8 square miles of the 71-square-mile school district.

Gilley, the former city manager of Lancaster, said developers believe they can still sell new homes in Palmdale, even with the proposed annual tax, which they must disclose to buyers. And, he added, “We recognize we can’t market homes if the schoolchildren can’t go to schools.”

Developers also were satisfied with the accord because the district agreed to limit the tax in several ways. One was by budgeting all future classrooms it would fund to be portable, though the district could add its own money to build permanent classrooms instead.

In another aspect of the deal, Palmdale is agreeing that it will no longer collect traditional school developer fees like those levied by most districts statewide. Palmdale now gets a one-time fee from developers of about $2,300 per house.

Although the fees are paid by developers and the tax would be paid by residents, officials argue that residents already are paying the bill, even if they don’t know it. Developers include such fees in the price they charge for new homes, officials said.