MIDLAND, Texas — Midland County Hospital District is still celebrating the fact over 70% of voters agreed to a quarter-cent sales tax addition inside the city and county of Midland back in July.
“It told us the community believes in what we’re doing," said Stephen Bowerman, Midland Health Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operational Officer. "We’re owned by the tax payers and we want to make sure that all the entities here are providing satisfactory healthcare."
The hospital was in need of the sales tax because the district is about to lose millions of dollars from Medicaid supplemental programs.
“We anticipate $38 million dollars in cuts between now and 2024," Bowerman said. "We anticipate the sales tax to offset a good portion of those losses."
The money from the sales increase will not add any services but it will allow certain services to stay running, such as:
- Midland Community Healthcare Services
- Behavioral health
- Certain specialist to be on call
“We’ll get to experience those things for long into the future because of the passage of the sales tax," Bowerman said. "But the sales tax won’t be put into play until Jan. 1, 2021 so nobody is being levied that tax today because it takes the state some time to get that into play for us.”
In the meantime, Midland Health's board of directors are meeting on August 27 to go over the 2021 fiscal budget for the hospital district.
The board of directors will discuss what they want to set the property tax to for next year.
“We got the sales tax so we’re going to adopt a no-new-revenue rate for the property side for fiscal 2021," Bowerman said. "We will use the sales tax to fund the programs we talked about.”
That means the board of directors are not planning on increasing property taxes for 2021 because the sales tax passed.
Now this of course must be presented and discussed with the board Thursday Sep. 26, 2020. A plan will be finalized on Sep. 30 with the board.