Mayor Andy Ogles Explains the Relationship Between County Government and School Systems

 

Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles in the studio to explain the association between county governments and their school systems.

Leahy: We are joined in studio by the mayor of Maury County. That bastion of freedom, that turbocharged engine of economic growth, Mayor Andy Ogles. You smile every time I say that.

Ogles: Again, a statement of fact that rolls off the tongue.

Leahy: It rolls off the tongue. Now, I wanted to talk to you a little bit when we were talking with Matt Hullander in the previous section who’s running for mayor of Hamilton County, a much larger county than Maury County. But, hey, the decade is not over yet. Maury County, you’ve got 100,000?

Ogles: 100,000.

Leahy: What will the population of Maury County be in a decade?

Ogles: I would say 130 to 150.

Leahy: Yeah, I’m saying 150, and I’ll tell you why. Because Middle Tennessee is probably the hottest place in the country for people to come to live. California people are leaving in droves.

Our friend Roger Simon, by the way, is working on a series of articles about the southbound train which is about people leaving California and Illinois and New York and coming to Texas, Tennessee and Florida.

If you want to come and leave those states, Middle Tennessee, is obviously very attractive. Davidson County, of course, but you got the high property taxes, you got the bad schools, Metro Nashville Public Schools there.

You have a sort of a left-leaning government there. Williamson County, a suburban area, with very, very high per capita income. Home prices in Davidson County, in Williamson County, are really up there. Maury County home prices are increasing.

Ogles: Yes. But not compared to the others.

Leahy: If you look at a big macro-level of where Americans who live in the United States right now want to escape to, Tennessee, and particularly Middle Tennessee has got to be the number one garden spot for people that want to escape high taxes.

We’ll be doing this show 10 years from today, Andy. And then after the 2030 census, we’ll sit down and I’ll say 150,000. You could say 130 or 150. I think it will be at least 150,000.

Ogles: Yes. If you were to base it off current growth trends, you’d say 130. But what you’ve got to anticipate is that the growth trend is going to accelerate over the next five years in particular, unless something drastic happens in the kind of macroeconomy.

So that puts you at 150. And one of the advantages that Maury County has when it comes to sustaining growth versus, say, a Rutherford or Williamson, which will continue to grow, as well is their existing populations and just amount of land available and traffic.

Leahy: There you go. Land availability. Rutherford County getting a little jammed up. Williamson County, it’s not just availability, it’s price points. Price points of Williamson County are ridiculously high.

Ogles: Yes. It’s pricing a lot of starter families, middle class working families out of the market. So they’re selling and they’re moving to a Dickson or they’re moving to Columbia, Spring Hill, maybe parts of Rutherford. But even the price points in Rutherford County are creeping up because of the cost of land acquisition.

Leahy: And Maury County, of course, you’ve got I-65 that goes right smack dab through the middle of Maury County. And if you’re commuting in at some point, you’d get to 65 and come up.

But given all this growth, I want to get back to a question we talked to Matt Hullander about in Hamilton County. How does the mayor of a county help improve the school system? Explain for a moment the relationship between the county government, which you had as mayor in Maury County, and the school system, which has its own county has its own county commissioners.

The school system has its own school board members. In Tennessee, there are 95 counties. Most counties have their own school districts.

There’s another I think, 40, 45 special districts as well. So it’s like 140 districts with their own school boards. But in Maury County, it’s Maury County School Board.

Ogles: Maury County schools. What you’ve got to understand is that your county commission is your funding body. All the dollars spent move through and are allocated by the county commission and then given to the school board to parse out and manage kind of on a day-to-day basis.

But you’ve got to back up a moment and understand that not all counties are run the same. And so you have the General Act, the 1957 Act, you have the 02 Act. And the Maury County is under a hybrid.

And so all that means is the mayor’s and the commission and their relationship with how the budget is managed when it comes down to it. As county mayor, I have veto authority.

Over the last three years, we’ve held the line on the school budget, not increasing it because I wanted the schools to go through their own budget. The county in Maury County, we have a very detailed process.

You literally go line by line budget code, by budget code, looking for ways. Schools typically don’t have that detailed of a process and push those best practices over to the school side of government so that we can find that waste.

Leahy: One of the complaints that I’ve had with the Metro Nashville Public School system and the way the Metro Council works with them is the Metro Council will approve a single number, a budget for Metro schools.

And then Metro schools will take that money and spend it however they want, not necessarily in alignment with anything that makes any sense. Lots of waste that comes through on that.

So you’re telling me that because you have veto authority on this, you have been able to work with the school system there to have greater accountability for the overall budget that the county approves, is that right?

Ogles: Yes. Keep in mind that under state law, there is a firewall between the county commission and the school board. Let’s say the school board comes to the county commission to the mayor and says, hey, we’re going to buy widgets and the commission allocates that money to buy widgets and they change their mind. By law, they can change their mind.

Leahy: The school board can change their mind.

Ogles: That’s right. But you have to have this trust relationship between the school board and the commission so the next time you come back if you’re a commissioner and the school board has not spent the money how they said they were going to spend it, now you’re a little harder on them and so that creates an accountability process.

It gets a little cumbersome at times. But when you look at it, I think that’s what the general assembly back in the day was trying to achieve is there was accountability between the county funding body and then the county school system.

Leahy: I think a lot of it depends on having a good relationship.

Ogles: Absolutely.

Leahy: And working relationship. I guess what you’re saying is in Maury County the county which you had as the county mayor, has a good but shall we say accountable working relationship with Maury County Public School.

Ogles: Absolutely. Life is about relationships and this is a great example.

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.