Local voters will head to the polls this March to decide on the fate of an existing property tax apportionment for local school funding, as the 30-year duration of the current apportionment is set to expire this year.

The Cullman County Commission approved setting March 19 as the date of the upcoming referendum at its regular meeting Tuesday. The referendum does not introduce any new taxes or restructure how they’re apportioned in any way; rather, it simply seeks to renew what’s been in place for the past 30 years.

The existing ad valorem tax structure that apportions local property tax funds to both city and county schools dates back to 1989, when an initial referendum was approved by Cullman County voters. Thanks to a more recent state law that redundantly requires a 10-mil apportionment of local tax funds for counties that do not set their own, Cullman County’s education funding via property taxes will change little, at least in the long term, should the referendum fail.

The current set of laws governing local property taxes for schools is set to expire in October with the end of the 2019 fiscal year, giving local government a six-month window, starting in March, to assure that the existing structure will continue — and time to adopt the state-level version of the law, should the referendum fail.

A survey of last year’s property tax records reveals that more than $5.6 million was collected for local education funding, county-wide, in 2018. Roughly 21 percent of all property taxes collected by the Cullman County Revenue Office last year were set aside for education.