Annexation to be on the ballot of Bastrop ISD voters

Bastrop ISD voters will definitely be making a decision on whether or not they should be annexed into the ACC taxing district this November.  The Bastrop County Friends of Higher Education submitted 1750 signatures on a petition to include annexation on the Nov. 2 ballot. They had to get signatures from five percent (1,177) of registered voters.

The ACC Office of Governmental Relations has verified 1672 petition signatures.

"The others were not valid; they just stop at some point when they are well over the required amount," ACC Media Relations Coordinator Alexis Patterson said.

Hays CISD, Elgin ISD,  McDade ISD, and San Marcos CISD are all still in the signature gathering phase of the annexation process.

 Now that the signatures have been verified, the ACC board of trustees will present a service plan to the community, outlining the services and options that would be open to them if they voted to become part of the taxing district.

"We've been hashing out what we expect in return for annexation," Bastrop County Friends of Higher Education's Tom Scott said.

ACC has committed to building a campus in Bastrop if they become part of the taxing district.

"We're calling it the ACC Lost Pines College," Scott Said.

Scott, a former mayor of Bastrop, believes that despite some of the opposition the idea of annexation is facing that it will be successful.

"We're going to work hard, we aren't going to take anything for granted…I'm confident, but we won't allow ourselves to become over confident," Scott said.

Bastrop is the first of the interested communities to have its petition verified, and move into the planning stages of what a Bastrop campus would look like.

According to Scott there are meetings planned for later this month to discuss workforce training. The board is working on getting the service plan ready for Bastrop. The plan has to be available to the public, no less then one month before the public hearings begin. At these hearings ACC will meet with members of the community to discuss the annexation.

"We didn't go into this naive, we knew some people wouldn't look at it as cost verses benefits, and just focus on the tax," Scott Said.

Opposition is mostly because, of the new tax annexation comes with. The board of trustees would formally expand the taxing district to include Bastrop ISD and residents would begin paying an ad valorem (property) tax. ACC's tax rate is 0.0946 cents $100 valuation.

"I would contrast the dozen or so people that have taken the time to write in (to a local newspaper in Bastrop) that are against it, to the almost 2000 that signed the petition," Scott said. "I'd rather go with the 2,000."