In a high-stakes fight over who controls millions in local education dollars, the Cobb County School District filed suit Monday asking a Superior Court judge to stop what it calls unlawful tax collection fees and to claw back more than $130 million the county has taken since 2011. District leaders say the mounting charges will gut classroom budgets, estimating the fee will top $13 million this fiscal year and could climb above $20 million next year. The case is now pending in Cobb County Superior Court.
The district has filed a verified petition for declaratory judgment and a writ of mandamus, according to a Cobb County School District press release. The petition names Cobb County and Tax Commissioner Carla Jackson as respondents and asks a judge to declare that Local Act 240 requires the tax commissioner to send education tax revenues to the school board without taking a collection fee, and to order the tax commissioner to comply.
The district and local coverage say Cobb County has collected more than $130 million in administrative fees from school tax revenue since 2011 and that the fee pulls money that would otherwise go to teacher pay, smaller class sizes and extracurricular programs, as reported by 95.5 WSB. District officials have cast the lawsuit as a line-in-the-sand move to defend classroom funding and say they are acting to protect both teachers and taxpayers.
How Local Act 240 factors into the fight
According to the petition, Local Act 240 is the controlling local law for school tax collection in Cobb County. The filing says the act originally allowed a temporary 1.6% collection fee that expired in 2011. The district argues the county tried to keep that fee alive anyway, first through a home-rule ordinance in 2011 and later by other methods, but that those efforts went beyond what the county is legally allowed to do and left no valid authority for continuing to charge the fee. The petition asks the court to adopt the district’s reading of Local Act 240 and to order the tax commissioner to remit all school tax funds to the Board of Education without any deductions.
Legal context
State law generally sets the ground rules for how school taxes are collected and what tax commissioners can charge for the service. Under O.C.G.A. §48-5-404, tax commissioners are authorized to collect commissions for handling school taxes and to remit the remaining funds to local school boards. Local acts can override or modify that default setup for a particular county, which is why the lawsuit zeroes in on the specific language of Local Act 240 and whether Cobb County lawfully extended what began as a temporary collection allowance. Georgia Code §48-5-404 lays out the statewide statute the district is asking the court to compare with the local act.
What to watch next
The suit, now on file in Cobb Superior Court, seeks a declaratory judgment on the meaning of Local Act 240 and a writ of mandamus that would order the tax commissioner to stop collecting the disputed fees, according to the district’s release. The district says its bottom line is simple: it wants those tax dollars to stay in Cobb County classrooms instead of going to county administrative charges. The case will work its way through the local court calendar, and upcoming hearings or rulings will decide whether Cobb County can keep taking the collection fees it has relied on for years.
