Re “Silbiger Makes the Case for Waiting on the Bond Measure”
[img]1686|right|Laura Chardiet||no_popup[/img]I am encouraged to see that my School Board colleague Karlo Silbiger has intentions of engaging the community in a meaningful discussion regarding a general obligation bond.
Board President Kathy Paspalis and I have been engaging groups in CCUSD since Balfour Beatty began its Facility Needs Assessment process in January. Supt. Dave La Rose has been engaging District staff, principals, teachers, and parents as well. When Facility Needs Assessment, Master Facilities Planning and Capital Improvement updates are provided in almost every Friday’s Board packet, I assumed my colleagues on the Board realized that this was a priority.
Mr. Silbiger has outlined his five preconditions for moving forward with a bond.
I cannot help but muse that if each School Board member presented his or her own five pre-conditions, it would be nearly impossible to get a bond on the ballot.
Placing the bond on the November ballot not only was the best way to ensure that the District could maintain its current momentum addressing long overdue capital improvements, but it was more fiscally prudent than waiting until a June or November 2014 ballot.
• Money was invested on time staff spent over the past seven months preparing for a November bond.
• Money was invested on consultants hired to determine the feasibility of placing a bond on the ballot.
• Interest rates are ticking up.
• Construction costs are ticking up.
• Potential loss of state matching funds. (We need to have our local matching funds in place and our plans Dept. of State Architect-approved. Otherwise, we will be in line behind Inglewood, Santa Monica-Malibu and the Los Angeles Unified school districts. Oh, wait! We already are. In a few weeks, we can look to see how much longer that line for scarce state construction grants will be because other school districts are placing bond measures on their local November ballots.)
Creating a comprehensive Master Facilities Plan is something we have been working towards over the past year.
It is important to know however that many school districts in our area have successfully passed a bond without one.
They had what we have now – a Facility Needs Assessment. Since it takes approximately six months for a school district to issue bonds after a successful bond election, it provides plenty of time to create a master facilities plan from our Facility Needs Assessment with even more input from stakeholders.
Questions have been posed regarding responsible funding mechanisms. The experts we hired advised us to pass a bond for these improvements, as this is the best practice in California for school districts. This allows our District to access today’s dollars with the purchasing power it has TODAY, and pay off the debt with future dollars that certainly will be worth a heck of a lot less.
Mr. Silbiger went on record at the July 1 School Board meeting suggesting the board think of doubling our current annual property taxes dedicated to the school district ($200 by his calculations). He states that by doubling this tax to $400 annually, the District could receive $2.5 million per year or potentially $50 million in 20 years for facility needs. No interest money would be paid to those “wealthy investors” in his scenario.
Let’s do some math on this. If a property owner paid $400 for 20 years on a parcel tax, that comes to a grand total of $8,000 and the District gets $50 million. Fair enough.
Let’s do some additional math on a general obligation bond tax for a homeowner whose property’s ASSESSED value (not market value) is $500,000. By state law, this tax cannot exceed $60 per $100,000 of ASSESSED value. Using this scenario, the District’s financial experts have demonstrated that in 25 years this homeowner would have paid $7,500 and the District would be able to get $125 million in funding.
Financing our facilities’ needs by leveraging money through the issuance of general obligation bonds also leverages time. We could realistically complete construction of all our needs with bond financing in 7 to 9 years, maybe less. A “Pay-as-You-Go” Plan (i.e. a parcel tax) is also a “Complete-as-You-Go” Plan. Do we really want to educate our children for the next 20 years on a construction site? What new family would want to purchase a home in Culver City knowing this?
Seniors are incredibly supportive of Culver City schools. And a large reason why measures such as EE, and Proposition 30 had such high passage rates. The survey was conducted by consultants who have a 95 percent success rate in predicting bond election outcomes based upon their survey. The survey demonstrated that seniors are supportive. Had the measure been placed on the November 2013 ballot, the community would have had an additional three months to scrutinize, prioritize, and provide input. Any Board member feigning this understanding is being disingenuous with the community and the voters.
I am disappointed that Board members Goldberg, Siever and Silbiger did not feel the reasons to place a bond on the November ballot were compelling. I am looking forward to working with “urgency” to make sure we don’t fall even further behind in June.
Ms. Chardiet, a member of the School Board, may be contacted at lchardiet@gmail.com
