Letters (Jan. 29, 2014)

How to draw more families here

At the Dec. 9 ?Commun?ity Conversation,? in light of the loss of 52 students from our school district, the question was asked, ?How do we get more families to move to Hillsboro??

Stan Thiessen, in his recent letter, identified two factors that drive people out of Hillsboro and deter others from moving here: lack of jobs and high taxes.

Since we are retired, we cannot speak to the lack of jobs, but we are homeowners and we know the bite of high property taxes. In the last 10 years, our property taxes have almost doubled. And according to our mayor, property taxes must again be raised to meet the needs of children in our schools.

At the community meeting, the school superintendent asked whether we supported a good education for our children. We doubt whether any citizen of Hillsboro would say no. But as life-long educators, we have seen first-hand that increasing the money in a district?s budget is not the only way nor necessarily the best way to improve our children?s education.

But if more money is demanded, our question then is, how long can we continue to put the burden of financing our children?s education primarily on the backs of the local homeowners?

We know that certain organizations and institutions are not required to pay property taxes, such as our public schools, Tabor College, and our churches.

We know the total population of Hillsboro is around 2,900. What we don?t know is the percentage of individual homeowners within that total population.

In other words, how many of the residents of Hillsboro are actually the ones who continue to pay increasingly higher and higher property taxes to support the education of Hillsboro?s children? And how long will they be able to do that before concluding that they can no longer afford to be homeowners in Hillsboro? Can the responsibility of paying for our children?s education be more equitably shared?

Hillsboro residents not only have high property taxes, but also high sales tax and high utilities, all of which continually rise (and now we find out that since at least 2005 Hillsboro has been subsidizing Peabody?s water bill).

If the city and school board are really interested in knowing what will attract families to Hillsboro and keep them here, dealing with high taxes and utilities is a starting point.

Karen and Gordon Wiebe

Hillsboro

More from Hillsboro Free Press
Card Showers (Jan 11, 2017)
Card shower for Bartel’s 90th Ann Bartel of Hillsboro will be celebrating...
Read More