Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

When Virginia’s General Assembly reconvenes in January, Isle of Wight County will again push for legislation that would authorize cities and counties to raise their sales tax 1% by voter referendum to fund school construction.

The matter remains included in a list of 2025 legislative priorities county supervisors discussed at their Aug. 15 meeting.

Only nine Virginia localities – Charlotte, Gloucester, Halifax, Henry, Mecklenburg, Northampton, Patrick and Pittsylvania counties and the city of Danville – are afforded the option under current state law. Isle of Wight County has been lobbying for the referendum option for the past three years as a possible means of paying back more than $30 million it borrowed in 2020 and 2021 to replace the circa-1961 Hardy Elementary with a new, larger Hardy that opened in 2023, and to fund the estimated $71 million cost of replacing another 1960s-era school, Westside Elementary.

House of Delegates Bill 805, sponsored by Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, during the 2024 legislative session, and Senate Bill 14, an identical bill by Sen. Jeremy McPike, D-Prince William, would each have abolished the list of authorized localities and expanded the option to all cities and counties. Both passed each chamber in February but were vetoed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin in April. Lawmakers, despite having passed both bills with the requisite two-thirds bipartisan majorities that could have handed Youngkin his first veto, declined to overrule Youngkin when reconvening on April 17.

“That’s something that I don’t think we can let go of,” Supervisor William McCarty said of the defeated sales tax bills. “We have to every year until there’s reform in that, we have to make that known.”

Youngkin’s office, in an April 9 statement, said he vetoed the bills over concerns that the statewide impact of city- and county-level 1% sales tax surcharges “could result in a nearly $1.5 billion a year tax increase on Virginians.”

Virginia’s statewide sales tax rate currently stands at 5.3%, though Williamsburg, James City County and York County already pay a combined 7% state and regional sales tax to promote tourism. The General Assembly, in 2013, authorized an additional 0.7% surcharge on top of the 5.3% statewide rate for Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to create a 6% rate to fund transportation projects. Were Virginia to allow an additional 1% surcharge for school construction, “Some localities would have a combined sales tax rate of 8%, with no additional offsets, such as reduced income tax or property tax,” Youngkin’s statement said.