Fresh off this week’s International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight and Wirefly X Prize Cup, the Doña Ana County Board of Commissioners will consider Tuesday starting the process of raising the gross receipts tax to help fund Spaceport America.
Commissioner Bill McCamley will make a presentation on the spaceport. He will also ask his peers to approve a resolution that supports the creation of a spaceport taxing district and directs staff to draft an ordinance that would take the 1/4 percent gross receipts tax increase proposal to voters.
If approved by commissioners Tuesday and with a later vote formally approving the ordinance, a special election would be held on April 3.
The last gross receipts tax increase, for public safety, amounted to a 1/8 percent hike.
Though the Nov. 7 general election and a school board election are being held before April 3, McCamley said he didn’t want the spaceport tax on either ballot so that it isn’t politicized by candidates whose names also appear on those ballots.
“This is an important enough issue that we want it to be on its own ballot,” McCamley said.
The tax would generate between $6 million and $6.5 million each year in
The school districts would be required to use the money to create “spaceport academies,” McCamley said. The goal is to have local “engineering and entrepreneurial programs based on the space industry.”
The academies would be part of a larger effort to educate area students in a field in which local jobs are being created, and give more young people a chance to stay here after they complete college degrees.
“Our biggest export is our talent,” McCamley said. “A lot of people go even though they want to stay, because they can’t find good, quality jobs.”
McCamley has already made his presentation to the Associated Students of NMSU and earned that body’s support, and makes his presentation to the NMSU Board of Regents on Friday.
The commission meeting will be held at the