The Little Cypress Fire and Rescue Department will keep operating as usual even though big sales tax payments will be ending. Bobby Manshack, a board member of Orange County Emergency Services District No. 3, which governs the fire department, said the payments from International Paper will end this month because the mill is now part of the city of Orange.
“Our intentions are to continue to operate,” Manshack said.
On Monday, the Texas Comptroller’s Office announced December sales tax payments to entities that collect the tax. The ESD 3 is getting $104,688. Manshack said the ESD has been putting aside money from the sales taxes into a fund to pay for a new building to replace the current one, which is about 50 years old.
At this time, the board is planning to cut back on the building and use the fund to continue the full operations of the fire department, Manshack said.
“We don’t know the extent of the loss until it happens,” he said. The ESD board of directors will meet next week to discuss how the loss of the sales taxes will affect income and services.
The ESD voters approved a sales tax in 2010 for businesses in the district. The sales tax was applied to items sold by the International Paper containerboard mill.
Last year, the company requested to be annexed to the city of Orange. The economic development contract with the city included the city not collecting sales taxes.
Manshack said the board has known the sales taxes will drop after the December 2015 check is received, but the members have not known how much income will be lost.
He said the sales tax checks for the mill have been sporadic by the month. “Sometimes (the payment) was very good and sometimes it wasn’t. Nothing was ever consistent with them; they went all over the board. But cumulative, it was a large amount of money,” he said.
One month last year, the ESD had a big check that wasn’t from International Paper. Manshack said he went through records and discovered the comptroller’s office had been sending the city of Orange taxes collected from a business in the ESD. Approximately $180,000 was sent to the ESD for the business’s taxes collected since 2010.
Manshack and Board President Joe Parkhurst have met with an architect to design a new fire station to replace the old one on North Highway 87. “We told him to scale back to half of what we were going to spend,” Manshack said.
The post ESD 3 Wants New Building appeared first on KOGT.