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Hurricanes Blow Holes in School Revenues

Local tax projections are still hard to figure as La., Miss. recover.

Now that almost all of the school districts that suffered damage from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have reopened, their leaders are scrambling to find the money to keep the districts solvent.

Districts along the coastline of Mississippi and Louisiana have used up most of the local revenue they had collected before those disastrous storms hit the Gulf Coast, and they don’t know how much they’ll collect in local taxes early next year. And state officials are telling them that their states won’t have enough money to come to the rescue.

The storms are expected to gouge a hole of at least $1 billion in Louisiana’s state revenue, but Mississippi economists are now estimating their state will recover quickly enough to meet its fiscal 2006 revenue goals. In any case, the hurricanes caused billions of dollars in damage to taxable real estate, in turn crippling local government revenue, at least...