Indiana School Referendums Expected to Surge as Property Tax Frustration Grows Across State

Okay, so school referendums used to, and by the way, again, education based organizations are estimating a hundred or more school referendums this fall. I told Braun back in the spring of last year, when he told me he was going to sign off on this bill, that that was going to happen. So this is you are going to open Pandora’s box on this referendum stuff for next to no savings for the taxpayers. And if you guys look at your property tax bills, you know, it’s backed this up. The assessment increases are eating into whatever savings you got. And within three years, most people, the savings will be gone. And here come the school referendums.

Indiana Homeowners Brace for Massive Wave of School Referendums in 2026

Because again, and this is what’s so important, the property tax bill was never about you. It was never about your home. It was never about saving you money. The property tax bill was about conning you into thinking that’s what it was about. And then ultimately, the purpose of it became to help our business friends. The biggest savers by far in the property tax bill are big business, tens of thousands of dollars a year in some cases. What are you getting, 300 bucks? Indiana and the Republicans in Indiana will always, always, always choose their business friends over you. Every time you are seen as nothing but slave labor to their big business friends, peasants, peons. That’s it. That’s what they view you as. Get to work. And so I told Braun back at the, when I still had some hope that he actually, like, gave a damn. You know, in the movie, like where the audience kind of knows who the bad guy is the whole time, but the main character doesn’t. That’s what the final meeting with myself and Braun was like, where the whole time, like the whole, you’re watching the movie, you know who the bad guy is. You see the evil things going on behind the scenes. The main character doesn’t. You’re yelling at your TV. You’re an idiot. Don’t do that. Don’t go in there. No, no, that’s what it was like. It was like Braun. And then eventually the bad guy reveals himself to be the evil character to the main character. That was me with Braun.

Critics Say Indiana Property Tax Reform Primarily Helped Big Business, Not Homeowners

And in the last conversation I had with Braun, when I still was like, okay, this guy, you know, he’s being led astray or whatever, right? He’s being given bad advice. Just listen to me. My favorite part of my last meeting with Braun was very quickly it turned from Mr. Governor to Mike. Okay, this is where it’s going. Ain’t no respect here anymore. But I told him, I said, you’re going to open the floodgates on these school referendums. This is going to happen all over the place. And that’s when he famously said, well, I’ll go. I said, are you going to go knock on doors? Yeah, I’ll do that. I said, okay, I’m pointing at Micah was there and Micah’s chief of staff was there and Josh Kelly, Braun’s chief of staff. I said, we got witnesses. Braun said he’s going to get on his sneakers and go knock on doors. Convenient how that didn’t happen. So they’re estimating over 100 school referendums this fall. And as usual, the Republicans and the governor have abandoned you. It’s your job to defend yourself. You don’t have to like it. You got to live with it. Vote accordingly this fall. Every incumbent Republican, for the most part, there’s a handful who didn’t, but for the most part, almost every incumbent, you know, one of the people who actually didn’t vote for this is Spencer Deery, and the Republicans are doing everything to take him out. But for the most part, most of these Republicans voted to give you this system where you get nothing, the businesses get everything, and now you’re forced to fight for your life in terms of protecting your home and go out and do this yourself. So you got it, guys. This is the key. So the school systems now have to bring referendums in the fall of even years. That was a change from the old system where they could put them on primary ballots. They could bring them back every year. School systems now can only do referendums in the general election of even years. So this is a general election. This is an even year, 26. There will be school referendums. So in order to do that, there’s a time frame by which the school has to announce they’re going to do it. It used to be for a primary, because one of the things schools used to do is they used to always do the referendums in the primary because they know nobody votes. They know they could get their people to vote. Most people won’t even know there is a referendum. They’ll get all their school employees and the school supporters will go out and vote. They’ll pass referendums. They can’t do that anymore. They used to have to vote on to do it in February to get it on a May ballot. Now they have to pass the referendum resolution in June. So your school board has a deadline. I believe it’s by the end of June to pass a referendum resolution which tells you, tells the public, we are putting this referendum on the ballot in the fall. So you guys keep an eye on that. Have they already done it? Some already have. A lot of them are going to wait till June because they don’t want to kick start the opposition. Here’s the things you have to do in order to defeat the school referendums. If you don’t do these things, it’s going to pass and it’s going to involve work and it’s going to involve a little bit of your own money. I’m sorry. There’s just no way around it. Trust me, I’ve searched far and wide. The number one thing, when you know your school is going to do a referendum, once they vote to do a referendum, is you have to organize a group of at least ten dedicated people. And when I say ten dedicated people, I mean at least ten. You need more, but at least ten. I mean, ideally you can get 20. You can get 30. The more you can get, the better. But at least ten dedicated people who will say to some extent, since the referendums are now in November, beginning at the 1st of August and running through Election Day, at least a portion of us will commit to getting to doors to inform people this referendum is coming and the harm of it. You got to have at least ten, ideally 20 or more, because every day you need somebody out hitting a neighborhood. I mean, you think about these thriving, growing communities, how hard that is. You know, you got 15,000 homes or 10,000 homes in a community. That’s a lot of work, guys. Trust me, I’ve done it. It’s a lot of work. And so you need to be strategic about that and realistic about it. And if you have ten or more people, then realistically, every day you should have 2 or 3 people who’ll dedicate an hour to say, we’ll go knock on these doors. We’ll go put these flyers in these doors. We’ll go tell people this is going on. We’ll go get signs in yards. That’s the first thing you got to do. If you try to do it on your own, it’s going to fail. And if you don’t have enough people, your opposition is going to fail.

How Taxpayer Groups Organize to Defeat School Referendums and Property Tax Increases

The second thing you got to do, and this is work, and you got to look into it. You got to form a political action committee, PAC. It sounds daunting. It’s pretty easy. You just go to your county government center and say, I’m forming this PAC. You have to have a president, I think it’s called a president and a treasurer. And forming the political action committee allows you to raise and spend money for your opposition. You’re going to have to do that. You’re going to have to spend money from, hopefully, this organization of people. And look, some people won’t want to like, go out and knock on doors, but maybe they’ll give you 500 dollars. Hey, I can’t commit to knocking any doors. Here’s 500 bucks. Go use that money. You got to form this political action committee off of your group, and then you got to form a bank account associated with it. Again, easy process. These community banks, they know how to do all this. It’ll take an hour, go in there, get the thing, you know, filled out and signed up, and then you’ll be on your merry way. And then you start raising money. Then you start raising money. And realistically, depending on what sort of operating referendum your school is going to ask, whether it is, as we said, depending on what sort of referendum you’re going to ask for, whether it’s an operating referendum, which are paying employees, or whether it’s a construction referendum, which is buildings, buses, etc., depends on what sort of opposition you’re going to face. If it’s a teacher pay referendum, expect every teacher in your district to be out working against you and singing just a sob story at every door about how little junior Johnny’s going to suffer if their raise doesn’t go through. They’ll always threaten to cut teachers and all of this, right? And that’s where you come in. Now look, the construction referendums are a little easier to beat because there’s no human element to it. They’re still hard, but there’s no human element to it. There’s no look at Sally. She was Johnny’s favorite teacher. And Sally could be out of a job. Oh, no. Of course, Sally’s not going to tell you about how much the administrators make. Or you know, how much the football coach makes or, you know, all these other people that make exorbitant salaries. They’re not going to lay that out. They’re going to go to the door of these unsuspecting people and go, you remember me? I’m Mrs. Thompson. I was Eric’s first grade teacher. Oh, yes. Hi. Hi, Mrs. Thompson. Well, I’m about to get fired if you don’t vote to raise your taxes by 20%. Oh, no. And this is where, after you guys have formed the PAC, and you guys have formed the group and you’ve got the bank account, you got to be prepared to get mean and you got to dig in and you got to read. Because I guarantee you in every school referendum, there’s a bunch of bloat and waste in there. And in every school district, there’s a bunch of bloat and there’s a bunch of waste, and you got to find what the most egregious things are in that referendum or in that school district. And you got to point them out to people. We call them, we say all these local elections are door hanger elections. And what I mean by that is 3 or 4 items, great big. You can put on a door hanger that when people get it and take it from the door to the trash, that’s what happens with door hangers. And that’s what happens with mailers, guys. You got 30 seconds on a door hanger or a mailer. Somebody takes it from their door and they put it in the trash. What do they see? If you put a bunch of print on and go work. I’ll never forget this. When I helped the people in Danville, we had the initial meeting. And by the way, this is how I’ve done my referendums that I’ve defeated. I’m telling you exactly what I’ve done. I’m giving you the blueprint here, right? I’m telling you how to do this. This is why this show is so valuable. I’m telling you exactly how it works. There is a formula to defeat these things. When I met with the people in Danville in 2019, I had this meeting with them. Organize this meeting. We have the meeting. I’m there sort of helping guide them through. I’m telling them what they got to do. And I said, okay, let’s start talking about what we want to discuss. And they wrote, I said, okay, just start writing on a board. And they had like 40 things on the board of things they were pissed off about the referendum. I said, okay, now cut them down to four. What do you mean cut them down to four? I said, the average person’s attention span is 15 to 30 seconds. You start talking about all this stuff, you’re going to lose them. The four most egregious things, the most egregious expenditures in the school district that is being proposed under the referendum, you got to pick them out. You got to point them out and you stay on them. You stay on them. Everything you talk about comes back to those things. And quite frankly, if you’re fully funded, you’re going to win or lose it based on those four things. Can you convince people there’s enough egregious behavior in the referendum to not raise their taxes? And those four things you pick, and it’s just like campaigning. Campaigning is the same way. 3 or 4 things you get on them. Everything you get asked about, you pivot back to those. When people vote for you, that’s what they think of. Another thing you got to do, and it’s getting easier now, the language has changed a little bit to make this easier, you got to tell people what the tax increase is. You got to tell people what the tax increase is. One of the things, and by the way, the school systems are starting the war. So you getting a little dirty in the battle, that ain’t no problem. It ain’t no problem. You didn’t start the battle. You not literally blowing things up, politically, right? You blowing a few things up, ain’t no sympathy on the school if you guys get a little creative. One of the things we did, and they got big mad at us when we did this on our side, we put 25% tax increase on our sign, largest tax increase in Brownsburg history. And the school got mad, but they couldn’t say anything about it publicly. Oh, they were fuming. They were like, a lot of people’s taxes aren’t going up 25%. Okay. How much are they going up? And they knew, right. Like it may not be 25% in some cases, but it was 20%. It was 21%, 22%. And they knew and they were pissed off. I said, okay, let’s have the argument. Go ahead and object to it because some people it was going to be 30. It was all over the map, right?

Opponents Warn School Referendums Become Permanent Tax Increases Once Approved

You are the victim in a school referendum. You are the victim. The school is doing it to you. And that brings me to my last point. And I say this in encouraging you to behave and all applicable laws and rules and regulations, society sets forth. Be a, you know, a law abiding member of society. But these people are coming for your stuff. They’re taking what’s yours. You didn’t ask them to do it. You’ve paid enough. You’ve paid enough. They have brought the fight for you. And that means you got to get mean and you got to get nasty. Don’t give these people a free pass on your town chatter boards and your community groups and your homeowners association. You bring the smoke, you name the names, and you talk about the people. Because if you just defeat the school referendum, it’s not enough. You got to make it hurt, again, in the confines of all law abiding, decent societal norms, right? There’s a reason our school system said we don’t want a school referendum this year. The reason was they saw what happened the last time, and it was made very clear to them, not that they needed it made clear to them, it would happen again, even worse. That doesn’t make me a bad guy. It made me creative. It made me smart. It made me effective. And now our community is going to save. I mean, here’s the thing about the referendums, guys, and you got to remind everybody this. Once these referendums start, they never stop. I mean, there’s a period where they stop, but then they always just get renewed. You look at the amount of referendums that get renewed, and by the way, they keep adding referendums. Carmel is about to have their third referendum, not renewed referendum. Like they’re about to have three referendums, three referendums outside the tax caps for their residents. They never stop. It’s like the plague, right? You can’t let it in your home. You can’t let it in your country. You gotta tell these people what you think of them. You got to tell the public what they are. You got to tell the public what they’re doing. And if you play nice, you’re going to lose. And it’s not about just beating the referendum. It’s about sending a message to the future.