Diet is painful for area fat on taxes
From the campus that houses Byron’s public schools, the nuclear power plant’s cooling towers shimmer in the distance, ghostly blue. For nearly a decade, those towers symbolized a font of plenty--generating electricity for every corner of the state and money, so much money, for this farm town across the chestnut-brown Rock River.
Commonwealth Edison owns the power plant and pays the property taxes. The utility’s payments covered the nearly $6 million tab for the physical education center, where elementary, middle and high school students run laps, practice long jumps and high jumps, play basketball and hit baseballs, all indoors. Edison money bought the huge fish tanks where tilapia swim as part of the aquaculture program.
Edison money paid for canoe trips and snow camps, and for the rotunda housing 30 computer-aided drafting modules where the children learn subjects from robotics to aviation. Byron High ascended both in sports and test scores. And while the greatest impact was on education--at one point, the company accounted for 97% of the operating budget--Edison money also put books on the public library shelves and fire engines in the firehouse. The 2,900 residents felt well served.
But the tax flow is proving as ethereal as the puffy clouds of water vapor hovering silently above the cone-shaped stacks. For years now, Edison has insisted that Ogle County, where Byron is located, over-assessed the plant, incorrectly classifying huge machines as real estate, which is taxed, rather than as personal property, which is not.
On such arcana hung the fates of two school districts (that of neighboring Oregon as well), two park districts, a college, a historical museum, a county government--all of which drew taxes from the plant.
The Illinois panel for tax appeals agreed with the utility. Late last year, so did the state’s appellate court. The 1992 assessment, which doubled from $517 million in 1991 to $1.04 billion, was cut very neatly in half again. The Ogle County taxing agencies have appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court as the bickering goes on.
Edison is protesting its latest assessment. The Byron plant, says the county, is now worth $462 million while the utility weighs in with an estimate of $287 million.
In the wake of so much turmoil, Byron school board members laid off 20 teachers a few weeks ago. Not only have foreign languages disappeared from the middle school, high school French has to go. The orchestra--gone. The jocks are pitted against the actors, the clubs against the classes.
“There are a lot of hard feelings,” said junior Peter Norman. “It’s strange the way things have changed almost overnight.”
Norman’s parents, like many others, moved to Byron for its happy combination of high-quality schools and low homeowners’ property taxes. Three of the 30 homes on his street are now up for sale--an unheard-of number.
Not only has the gusher slowed dramatically, the various taxing agencies face the prospect of a court-ordered refund that could go as high as $60 million, according to a local daily paper’s estimate. In this largely agrarian locale, that’s a big-time bill. To imagine the consequences, “think Orange County,” suggested Ogle County Treasurer Chris Martin.
Such talk distresses Edison spokesman Paul Callighan. “We have a vested interest in the area. . . . We want it to be prosperous, not going broke,” he said.
Karl Jacobs, president of Rock Valley College (where tuition rose $13 per credit hour to help offset the loss of nearly one-third of the annual budget), has been mulling the wider implications. In this drama, he concluded, “there are no villains” save possibly the tax system itself.
After all, Edison is responsible to consumers of electricity, who want to keep rates low. And even a company has a right to protest its tax assessment (“It’s an American thing,” said a letter to the editor of a county weekly). On the other hand, Ogle County based its increase on the outcome of a similar case elsewhere in Illinois. Public officials say that to assess less than they saw fit would have been unjust to all the other taxpayers.
Byron’s children will have textbooks, roofs that don’t leak and school bus tires, even if some amenities must be lopped and a bond or two issued. But citizens get used to a certain level of services, noted William Craig, the principal for the high school’s ninth and 10th grades. “It’s naive to believe that they won’t be missed,” he said.
Craig still hopes for a Supreme Court victory. But either way, it is the not knowing that hurts. For now, Byron and environs are waking to the knowledge that cash can be addicting. No one is enjoying withdrawal.
