Very important: There has been no decline in the willingness of Carmel, Indiana voters to pay property taxes for schools in the past 15+ years. The school levy passed with 58% of the vote. This nominally looks like a big decline from the previous referendums: 68% 2023, 69% in 2019, 89% in 2017. However, 2017 was a special election. 2023 and 2019 were off-cycle municipal elections. These are lower turnout elections, which benefit school referendums. In fact, I believe the state GOP banned holding referendums in these years because it was mad too many places were seeing referendums pass (along with other changes to try to make it harder to raise taxes for schools). The original school level referendum was in 2010, also a midyear election, albeit in the primary. It passed with 58% of the vote. So after 16 years, in a similar election year, Carmel's school funding referendum passed with an identical percentage. That shows that Carmel citizens remain very willing to pay property taxes. It's another example of how the Indiana GOP's entire thesis around property taxes was completely false. SEA 1 did the GOP an incredible amount of harm in suburban areas.