All the details aside, what I want to report here is what the real affect Tate & Lyle's decision not to pay their full taxes for 2016 means to you and I.

The letter T/L sent to local governments says they will be paying $960,463.00 less than what their current tax bill is. This is revenue that both Loudon County, Loudon City, Loudon County Schools and Lenoir City Schools already had calculated into their budgets for this fiscal year. So it will have an immediate impact on all local governments. Here's the numbers.

Loudon City will lose $372,173.00
Loudon County will Lose $588,290.00

Because Loudon County has a school system, nearly 65% of all property tax revenue goes to the schools. That means the Loudon County school system will have an immediate cash shortfall of $382,379.00. And because of how school funding works, about 37% of the county school system's money goes to the Lenoir City school system. That means, the Lenoir City schools will immediately lose $104,408.00.

In review, Tate & Lyle's decision to not pay they're current assessed property taxes shakes out like this:

Loudon City will lose $372,173.00
Loudon County will Lose $588,290.00 
Loudon County Schools will lose $382,388.00
Lenoir City Schools will lose $104,480.00

I have no idea how the school systems will compensate for the sudden and unexpected loss of that much money but that's a lot of teacher salaries, books and class room supplies that will have to be made up from somewhere or reduced.

Now I ask a question, why would a multibillion dollar corporation, that's been here for decades all of a sudden decide they don't want to pay their property tax obligation and leave our local governments and even worse our school systems in a financial bind? I don't know either.

Did they really think this through? Did they really know what a devastating financial impact this would have in so many quarters? Do they care?