Selma school officials will come back with a request for voters to increase the millage the system receives from the county’s tax base.

But that vote may be as long away as 2012, according to interim Superintendent Don Jefferson.

Members of the Selma City School Board discussed the vote Tuesday during a called meeting at the Central Office.

Last week, the school system withdrew its request to the Dallas County Commission for a special election to allow voters to decide on a 3-mill tax levy for Selma City Schools.

After school officials made their request last week, the county’s attorney pointed out because of absentee voting requirements to allow citizens to cast ballots from overseas, the county could not prepare absentee ballots quickly enough for the millage referendum to appear on the Nov. 2 general election.

School officials had considered an alternative date of Dec. 7, but when they discovered the election would cost the county an unbudgeted $40,000 to $50,000, school board President Henry Hicks and Jefferson decided to withdraw the request.

“There was no way we would get any true support,” Jefferson said.

Instead, Hicks, Jefferson and board member Holland Powell discussed an alternative that could see the school board asking its legislative delegation to present a bill in the Alabama Legislature allowing the school system to ask for more than the 3 mills it had sought in the beginning.

Three mills would generate about $370,000 annually.

“Three mills won’t give us what we really want to do,” Hicks said. “The timing was just not right.”

Hicks said November and December are not good months to ask voters to increase their taxes.

However, the school board president said, the recent move “just opened the door for us that we are serious and we’re coming.”

He said he does not know right now how much millage the school system will request. “There are a lot of people we need to bring to the table on that,” Hicks said.

Powell, who initially opposed the 3-mill increase, said he would lobby in Montgomery and work for the initiative “Once we get our finances in order and we’ve made hard cuts and hard political decisions.”

Powell wants the school system to seek more millage because the school board won’t have another opportunity to make the request if it seeks less and loses. “We’re dead in the water,” he said.

Hicks said the next possible election the referendum could surface is August 2012 when city officials and the school board are up for re-election. The school board will plan out its strategy and make its request at least 120 days before that election, the school board president said.

The money generated by the extra mills would go into the general budget of the school system. Selma has felt the impact of proration for the last two years, as have schools all over the state, Jefferson said.

During the last two years, the school system as lost about $9 million to proration. Most recently, the school system lost an extra 2 percent when Gov. Bob Riley cut education funding after BP said it would not pay Alabama’s $148 million claim for tax revenue lost to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico because of a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Troy King over the governor’s objections.

Riley’s cut cost the school system $379.889.25 of the $1.5 million it was to have received in September from the state, Jefferson said. That’s the equivalent of nine teachers’ salaries and benefits.

The interim superintendent expects another 5-7 percent proration later in the year, but the system has had to budget as though it will receive all its money due from the state.

“We’ve got to make ends meet,” Jefferson said.