This story was updated on Sunday, March 16, 2025, to add final early voting totals and details on state and federal funding to Chatham County school system.
Energized by Donald Trump’s reelection in November and his administration’s current efforts to slash the size of the federal government, Republican groups in Chatham County have taken aim at what they say is another source of waste, fraud and abuse: the county’s one-cent tax on retail sales to fund public-school infrastructure.
The tax, known as the Educational Special Local Option Sales Tax, or ESPLOST, is the subject of a special election on Tuesday. Voters will be asked whether to continue the levy, which has been in place since 2006, for another five years.
Falling a day after St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in Savannah, voter turnout for the referendum is expected to be low and the deciding margin narrow. At the end of early voting on Friday, only 3,008 voters — or 8% of Chatham’s 240,800 registered voters — had cast ballots in person or returned absentee ballots, according to the county’s Board of Registrars.
A low-turnout election typically favors the candidate or cause with the most ardent and organized supporters.
Anti-ESPLOST campaigners belonging to the Chatham County GOP, Ladies on the Right and other local Republican groups fit that description.
Echoing the cost-cutting fervor of Trump, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, they say a rejection of the one-cent sales tax for education would be a needed shakeup of what they describe as a bloated, spendthrift Chatham public school system that’s overly fond of “Taj Mahal” schools.
“We’re not against capital improvements for schools,” Beth Majeroni, a former candidate for state Senate who is campaigning against the measure. But ESPLOST, she says, “is a boondoggle.”
West Chatham construction
The Chatham County School Board says the estimated $705 million that a renewed sales tax is expected to generate would be used to address the infrastructure, security, and equipment needs of a population of some 35,400 K-12 students that is roughly stagnant in most parts of Chatham but growing in the west of the county.
The board’s plan is a catalog of what the board says is needed for construction or refurbishment across the school district, which currently has 55 schools.
Highlights of the plan include construction of a K-8 school, high school, and athletic complex in west Chatham, at an estimated cost of $115 million.
The board’s blueprint also calls for the rebuilding of Windsor Forest Elementary School and the STEM academy at Bartlett Middle School at a cost of $121.6 million, as well as the renovation of Savannah High School and the school system’s Bull Street headquarters at a cost of $120 million.
Brittany Brown, chair of the Chatham County GOP, didn’t reply to a request for comment about the committee’s opposition to renewing the one-cent sales tax.
But in a statement posted on its website, the committee says the tax is unfair because, like other sales taxes, it’s regressive, which means it “disproportionately affects lower-income individuals who may not benefit directly from the educational improvements funded by this tax.”
Voting “no,” it says, would return power to taxpayers and give Chatham County an opportunity “reassess its allocation of existing funds, streamline operations, and eliminate wasteful spending to better serve students.”
It says defeating the ESPLOST also would enable the county to “explore more sustainable and equitable ways to support its educational system without burdening residents with additional taxes,” ways that might include “securing private partnerships or state-level funding initiatives.”
‘Permanent statewide sales tax’
Opponents of the ESPLOST face a daunting task in rallying support.
As a way to finance infrastructure improvements for public school systems, a one-cent sales tax on retail purchases has proved very popular since voters approved it as an amendment to the state’s constitution in 1996.
By 2017, all but one of Georgia’s 159 counties have passed at least one ESPLOST referendum. Most had approved the tax numerous times.
By the end of the last decade, the ESPLOST had become, in effect, a permanent statewide one percent sales tax, write Ross Rubenstein and Nicholas Warner of the Center for State and Local Finance at Georgia State University.
Voters prefer “pay as you go” financing of infrastructure improvements over increases in property taxes — the third rail in Georgia politics — or borrowing money and incurring long-term debt.
In Chatham, voters have overwhelmingly supported the tax since it first went on the ballot in 2006, none more so than the county’s Black residents.
That year, they flocked to the polls in support of the tax, viewing it as a way to revive decaying schools in their neighborhoods, which were suffering from the effects of middle-class and white flight to the suburbs and private schools. The “yes” vote is credited with helping spark a public-school renaissance.
Support for the tax has remained high.
By an average of more than 34% of the vote, county voters have approved the three ESPLOST referendums that have been held in non-presidential election years. The fourth, in 2016, won by nearly 20%.
‘Great’ funding model
The opponents of continuing the one-penny sales tax also face a formidable coalition of pro-business groups who support it.
It is led by the Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce and its president, Bert Brantley, a former deputy to Gov. Brian Kemp.
Speaking to reporters alongside school superintendent Denise Watts this week, Brantley said the labor needs of a booming regional economy require investment in public schools, especially in infrastructure, to “make sure that we have the facilities that our teachers can go in and teach our students, our students can learn.”
In a state where the local sales tax has become the main source of infrastructure funding for schools, Chatham is one of the fortunate counties, Brantley said. It is a funding model that capitalizes on Chatham County’s status as a tourist destination. Up to 40% of the tax is paid for by visitors to the county, he and other supporters say. Collections cannot be used for regular operations.
“It is really great way to take the burden off of our property owners and our business owners, Brantley said.
Possible winners
The chamber’s support for a “yes” vote is more than rhetorical.
Its donation of $25,000 is the single largest contribution to a group formed in December to campaign for the measure.
As of March 3, the Building Better Futures Committee had taken in contributions totaling $140,750 and spent $114,256, most of it — $45,639 — for mailings and digital ads, according to its campaign finance disclosure report.
The remainder of the list of contributors to the campaign committee is dominated by groups who could benefit substantially from the ESPLOST-funded infrastructure projects: construction, engineering and architecture firms.
T.Q. Constructors, Inc. in Candler County contributed $20,000 to the committee. Contributing $15,000 each to the pro-ESPLOST campaign were McKnight Construction Company in Augusta, J.W. Oliver Construction Inc. in Jesup, and Hussey Gay Bell and J.E. Dunn Construction, both of Savannah, according to the committee’s filing to the state ethics commission.
How much of a hangover?
As supporters and opponents of the tax spend the final weekend before Tuesday’s referendum distributing more fliers and knocking on more doors across the county, there is mounting uncertainty, both in Chatham and elsewhere in the state, over the roiling landscape of public-school funding.
The Trump administration has targeted programs for local schools run by the U.S. Department of Education, which it has vowed to eliminate. That worries school officials.
Current U.S. Department of Education (DOE) grants to Chatham public schools total more than $48.2 million, the school system’s finance division said in a report in February, Georgia’s education agency provides $7.4 million in funding.
The largest federal award is a $17.7 million grant under the DOE’s Title 1 program for children from low-income families to provide them with “significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and to close educational achievement gaps.”
The education agencies of both the state and federal governments also provide a combined $10.7 million to Chatham to finance learning services for children with disabilities.
Besides concerns about the future of federal and state funding for Chatham schools, the school voucher program signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp last year represents a shift in state resources away from public schools and to private education.
In a sign of its concern over disruptions to public-school funding, the Republican-led state House of Representatives on Tuesday approved for the first time additional funding to educate poor public-school students.
These challenges to longstanding school-funding formulas means that the stakes for this referendum on the education-related sales tax may be higher than ever.
The highest turnout for an off-year ESPLOST was in 2011, with 39,313. The lowest was a decade later, the most recent ESPLOST, when only 22,612 voters went to the polls. It could be a record low this time around, election officials say.
Previous ESPLOST referendums fell in September or November. And this one comes not only one day after Savannah’s St. Patrick’s Day celebrations, but months after the draining presidential election. Hangovers from both may prove a factor.
For Majeroni and other opponents of the measure, however, the government-reducing, cost-cutting zeal filtering down from Washington is motivation to vote.
“What we’re seeing with the Department of Government Efficiency makes us all very skeptical of where our tax money goes,” she says.
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