VoteNoBonds.com

Archive - 2/17/2005 10:54 AM
By: Associated Press

(CHARLOTTE) - Mecklenburg County’s newest high school includes a half million dollar artificial turf football field that school board members apparently didn’t know was being installed.

WCNC in Charlotte reports that the school board voted for a natural grass field when they approved bids for the football stadium in December 2003. Six months later, a second vote on the new high school’s academic buildings also included a half million dollar upgrade to the field.

The company that installed the field says the artificial surface will actually save taxpayers money because the upkeep for grass football fields is a lot more expensive.

Mecklenburg school board member Vilma Leake calls the field a luxury at a time when the system is trying to build schools and repair ones already in existence.

Assistant School Superintendent Guy Chamberlain approved the project, but says in hindsight that maybe he should have brought the project to the school board’s attention.

Mecklenburg County Government spending paid for by local taxes has more than doubled in 11 years, marking an average annual increase of 10.2 percent. Driving much of the spending binge are payments of principal and interest on debt issued for school construction. Just as a bigger car loan requires a greater monthly payment, government’s annual debt service cost grows as bond debt piles up. Since 1995, $1.5 billion of school construction debt has been approved. Yet today, despite a property tax burden 116 percent higher than in 1995, we still confront an overcrowding crisis in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. What’s wrong? Priorities!

Tonight, the Board of Education is expected to request a total November bond referendum of $510 million­$427 million for construction and renovation and $80 million for land acquisition. This proposed bond package is unaffordable and unfocused on the priority of providing every student a permanent seat in a school near home. It promises to repeat mistakes made since 1999 when serviceable schools were razed and replaced only to be half-filled­including Lincoln Heights, Billingsville, Pinewood, Westerly Hills, Walter G. Byers, Thomasboro, Druid Hills and Ashley Park Schools. Reconstructed First Ward Elementary, for another example, has 49 classrooms for 639 students­13 students per room. Meanwhile, unaddressed suburban growth has produced huge trailer farms and students lunching outdoors on winter days. Mecklenburg taxpayers cannot afford continued spending without priorities and neither can students.

We Republican members of the Boards of Education and County Commissioners offer an alternative approach focused on CMS’s critical infrastructure need­relief of overcrowding. We favor $253.8 million of Commissioner-approved COPs financing over two years strictly for construction of new seats (i.e., new schools and seat additions to existing schools) and no bond referendum this fall, except for the planned land acquisition bonds. If the budget-busting $510 million package is submitted, voters should vote “no,â€? knowing that growth construction needs can be met through COPs. (Certificates of Participation (COPS) are bonds that have as collateral the property affected; the particular school or library. COPS do not require a vote of the public. The County Commission may issue these by a simple majority vote. General Obligation Bonds have as collateral everyone’s property, which is why they have to be voted on by the public. The difference in interest rates is about 1/4 point.

The Board’s $510 million bond request expected tonight is not sized to cover two years of spending, but rather to break a ten-year, $2 billion spending plan into chunks voters might swallow. By contrast, the Republican COPs proposal is targeted to spending anticipated in the coming biennium. $253.8 million of COPs will provide for all new seats proposed to be constructed under the Board’s expected package. Together with $291 million in already approved bonds and COPs, $253.8 million of additional funding will amply authorize the $170 million school bond/COPs sales each January that the County Manager currently plans.

To be sure, with new COPs of $253.8 million and already approved COPs of $103 million tasked for building new seats to relieve overcrowding, CMS will have to reexamine carefully its prioritization of renovation projects for the remaining $188 million of previously approved G.O. bonds available. Nice-to-have but unnecessary projects, such as the $18 million replacement of half-full Marie G. Davis Elementary, should be reconsidered.
In addition to covering two years of spending and redirecting capital spending toward the highest priority, the Republican proposal will avoid committing CMS prematurely to decisions best considered after completing student assignment plans this fall and recruiting a new superintendent in the coming year.

Here are the details of our plan:

* Issue COPs to fund all new schools and seat additions in the forthcoming Board of Education proposal:

Southeast High School
Belmeade Road Middle School
Ridge Road Middle School
Belmeade Road Elementary School
Bradley Elementary School
Dixie River Road Elementary School
Elon Park Elementary School
Hucks Road Elementary School
Idlewild Road Elementary School
Providence Road Elementary School
North Mecklenburg HS Addition (16 classrooms)
South Mecklenburg HS Addition (9 classrooms)
Alexander MS Addition (6 classrooms)
Alexander Graham MS Addition (17 classrooms)
Cochrane MS Addition (10 classrooms)
McClintock MS Addition (9 classrooms)
Idlewild ES Addition (2 classrooms)
Long Creek ES Addition (9 classrooms)
Even as to these projects, costs may be overstated. Elementary schools just completed cost $11 million; new ones are budgeted at $16 million. The COPs approval process before County Commissioners can provide for auditing of CMS cost estimates and identify cost escalators.

* Defer/reprioritize renovation and other projects identified in the Board’s proposal:

Satellite Maintenance Facility
Transportation Maintenance Facility

RENOVATIONS
Garinger HS (science labs)
Independence HS (gymnasium)
Myers Park ES (gymnasium)
North Mecklenburg HS (renovation & addition)
South Mecklenburg HS (renovation & addition)
Alexander MS (renovation & addition)
Alexander Graham MS (renovation & addition)
Cochrane MS (renovation & addition)
Davidson MS (renovation & addition)
McClintock MS (renovation & addition)
Sedgefield MS (renovation)
Idlewild ES (renovation & addition)
Long Creek ES (partial replacement)
Amay James Pre-K (renovation)

LIFECYCLE REPLACEMENTS
East Mecklenburg HS Auditorium (renovation)
Garinger HS Track
Olympic HS Canopy
Olympic HS Emergency Generator
Olympic HS Stadium (field house, restrooms, bleacher upgrades)
South Mecklenburg HS Canopy
West Charlotte HS Track
West Mecklenburg HS Stadium (field house, restrooms, bleacher upgrades)
Hawthorne MS HVAC
Hawthorne MS Plumbing
Ranson MS Gym Floor and Bleachers
Cornelius ES Bus Lot
Pineville ES HVAC
Pineville ES Plumbing

MANDATES AND INITIATIVES
ADA Compliance
Cooler/Freezer Updates (various schools)
Fire Alarm Upgrade (Various schools)
Instructional Technology
Intercom Integration
Kitchen Hot Water (various schools)
Modular Middle
O&Q/Asbestos
Performance Contracting
Structural Evaluation and Repair

We can meet community priorities for schools and have an affordable community. Let’s take a first step in the right direction.

Board of Education Members:
County Commissioners:

__________________________________
Kaye McGarry

_________________________________
Jim Puckett

_________________________________
Larry Gauvreau

_________________________________
Dan Bishop

_________________________________
Bill James

In response to “Pivotal year” (Aug. 21):

A word of caution to the “middle ring” schools coalition that successfully lobbied to bus District 6 students from Olde Providence South, Thornhill, Endhaven and CrownPoint neighborhoods out of their closest high schools.

The $427 million [school bond] question is whether we choose to cooperate with CMS’s forced social engineering going forward.

Alicia Durand
Charlotte

Letters to the Observer

Posted on Sun, Aug. 28, 2005
`Vote no’ campaign begins on bonds

CARRIE LEVINE
Staff Writer

Usually, politicians want your vote for something.

But three Republican Mecklenburg County commissioners have a different strategy.

They want you to vote against $427 million in school bonds on the November ballot.

Their campaign against the bonds is unusual because the county commissioners themselves set the amount to be placed on the ballot.

But the three Republicans — Jim Puckett, Dan Bishop and Bill James — thought the board should have asked voters for millions of dollars less, and they urged the board’s six Democrats to approve a lower amount.

They did not prevail, and now say voters should send a message by voting no.

“Almost always, these bond packages are unanimous or nearly unanimous (among board members),” Puckett said. “This one wasn’t. I hope the public will notice that.”
…
Puckett said voters no longer can afford tax increases and are ready to hear about ways to cut spending, even for schools.

Commissioners Chairman Parks Helms, a Democrat, said Republicans will promise to issue another type of debt — one that does not need voter approval — to build schools in the suburbs needed to meet the needs of growth.

But renovations to older inner-city schools will be left out, he said.

“The message is, we’re going to discriminate against inner-city schools,” Helms said.

Republicans say the opposite is true: The renovations to inner-city schools are included in the bond package to make it more palatable to urban voters, and those repairs represent unnecessary spending.

“We can’t afford to do things that we don’t need to do while we have grossly overcrowded schools on the fringes of the county,” Republican Dan Bishop said.

Commissioners vice chair Wilhelmenia Rembert, a Democrat, said the public has a mixed view of CMS, and building support for the bond package will not be easy.

Charlotte Observer Article…

Posted on Wed, Jul. 13, 2005
Carrie Levine

What does borrowing money mean to voters?

It will cost them more money to pay the debt back with interest — resulting in tax rate hikes, service cuts or a combination.

For instance, county finance officials say a projected 2010 debt payment of $239 million would rise. The final payment amount will depend on how much voters agree to borrow in November. County commissioners could ask voters for any amount, as long as they don’t exceed the maximum they set Tuesday night — $607.5 million divided among four categories.

Because the county’s tax rate is influenced by several factors, both revenue and expenses, it is difficult to project the impact rising debt payments will have in future years.

But finance officials say the county’s debt payments have been driving recent budget and tax rate increases.

The county is scheduled to make $207 million in debt payments in 2005-06, and officials say the large payment was a major factor driving the 10.6 percent tax rate increase county board members passed last month.

Read the article…
http://www.charlotte.com/mld/charlotte/news/local/12119194.htm

Archive - News | Citizen Servatius 05.05.04
BY TARA SERVATIUS

If you brought in a cartographer from Alaska who knew nothing about local politics and showed him last year’s maps of where Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools planned to build and renovate schools in the next decade, he’d be baffled.

The colorful dots representing the new schools CMS has now built, or planned to build or renovate at the time, are mostly in the center, where the bulk of the county’s population doesn’t live. A few stray dots are scattered in the suburbs, where most people in this county do.

The date of these maps, which were part of the Long-Range School Facilities Master Plan, is September 2003, just before a suburban majority took over the school board. This was far more than a building plan; it was a desperate blueprint for one last stab at integration by the same school board that fought in court to keep the system integrated. It was a plan not just to renovate schools, but to cluster the bulk of the newest seats in and around its center, which over time would force white kids to be bused in, reintegrating the system. That’s why many schools already built and renovated under this plan now sit half empty. They were overbuilt, and that was no accident.

To understand how we got here, you’ve got to understand the thinking of the last school board. They knew that without busing, suburban schools would get even whiter, the best teachers would follow, and the disparities would snowball in an endless Catch-22. So the way they saw it, they had three choices: Shut down dilapidated schools in the county’s center, forcing minority kids into suburban schools; build new seats in the center of the county, which would eventually force suburban kids into those schools; or dictate to teachers where they would teach and let the kids follow them, a game teachers wouldn’t be eager to play and that low-income children would never win.

The last school board was midway through option number two when the unforeseen disaster occurred. They lost control of the school board after suburbanites finally noticed that all the school construction they kept voting for didn’t include much for them. The new board has, of course, no intention of filling the extra seats planned and built in the center of the county with suburban kids. Instead, it has completely reversed direction, leaving some of the center county schools that still need work in limbo. Before they’re done, the new board will likely blow hundreds of millions more on suburban schools we should have built five years ago.

Read more…
Creative Loafing Article

By BRIAN GOTT - STAFF WRITER

If voters approve a school bond package at the polls this November, it won’t matter what the total bond is; suburban residents of the county will likely be the ones who end up the big losers, according to some county commissioners and school board members.

That’s because Democrats currently hold majority control of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, and Democrats on both elected bodies said they favor filling empty seats in inner city schools ahead of building new seats in suburban schools.

For example, Commissioner Valerie Woodard, a Democrat, said she would only vote for a bond package that guarantees filling inner-city schools ahead of building new schools in high growth areas. Similarly, Commissioner Norman Mitchell, a Democrat, has often used suburban school overcrowding hostage as a means toward an end of filling inner-city school seats.

“I think some of the children in those areas can come to some of the schools in the inner city,� Woodard said. She also said it was “hog wash� that crowded schoolroom conditions hamper learning.
“I think you can have rooms at full capacity and children can still learn,� Woodard said.
…

Several school board members, like Vilma Leake, routinely make it a point to comment that the district needs to move students from overcrowded, suburban schools to fill empty seats in inner city schools, instead of building new schools in the suburbs. Others contend that the school system has for years been using brick-and-mortar misprioritization to supplant forced busing to accomplish the same end.

Excerpt…
The Republicans – commissioners Jim Puckett, Dan Bishop and Bill James and school board members Larry Gauvreau and Kaye McGarry, want the COPs to be spent only on “new seats,� or the areas in the county with the highest growth and the most overcrowded schools. Of course, that might not matter with a board of commissioners controlled by a tax-and-spend majority bent on spending money on under-capacity schools.

Excerpt…
McGarry said the core problem is that Democrats on both the school board and board of commissioners are not being fiscally responsible, something that voters need to be made aware of. In turn, she said, voters need to lobby their elected officals to spend any bond or COPs money in a fiscally realistic manner that puts priorities over partisanship and political pandering.

“We have a very liberal board of commissioners,� McGarry said. “I just think they don’t have any real sense of fiscal accountability to the taxpayers.

“Our most critical need is the new [school] construction,� she said. “I think they are bypassing the real issue. Everybody’s little pet project is in there and that’s not showing fiscal accountability.�

Gauvreau, who represents the northern end of the county where suburban schools are routinely overpacked and littered with trailers, said he agreed that any bond package that fails to prioritize spending in the areas where it’s needed the most to alleviate severe overcrowding would be a loss for the community.

“The powers of Charlotte are always going to try to cut off suburban areas first,� Gauvreau said. “It’s institutional liberalism at work. The priority isn’t the suburban students. It’s wrong, but that’s the way they think.�

Rhino Times Article

Excerpt…
While more school nurses would be great, this seemed a diversion from the main point of the summit — which was what? Apparently, over a dozen politicians spent an entire day listening to presentations some of them could have given themselves in order to build support for a real estate transfer tax, and for the 20 percent increase in funding the schools are seeking.

The Charlotte Chamber’s education group has been studying the transfer tax option behind closed doors since last year under the guidance of school board member and VP of the Chamber’s education group Kit Kramer. If the transfer tax became reality, one percent of a home’s value would pass to the county every time it is bought or sold. Creative Loafing’s attempts to get minutes from the Chamber meetings on the tax were rebuffed by Kramer.

Excerpt…
At the moment, it appears the school board will be petitioning the county to put $600 million in bonds for school construction on the ballot this fall, which would ultimately be paid for with property tax revenue unless the county gets a transfer tax.

Taxpayers can’t afford to keep paying the bills for all of this school construction, said School Board member Vilma Leake in support of the transfer tax, despite the fact that those who buy and sell homes here are the same taxpayers who already pay school bond bills.

Whatever the case, there is some rumbling that the bonds, which will likely include funds for several suburban schools the school board has put off building, could face political friction. Suburban school building has been a political hot potato since 1998, when the courts ended forced busing for racial integration here. Some local leaders believe that more schools in the suburbs will lead to more racial segregation of both urban and suburban schools.

At the summit, school board member Louise Woods questioned the need for large numbers of new schools, suggesting that trailers were educationally adequate facilities, a line of thinking guaranteed to enrage suburban parents who feel they’ve waited their turn while the system built schools in less populous central and middle ring areas of the county.

Though the school system has yet to offer an official bond proposal, Democratic County Commissioner Norman Mitchell, who did not attend the summit, is threatening to lobby his fellow Democrats not to support the bonds if Republicans on the commission complain too loudly about the tax hike Democrats say they’ll need to pay for increasing school costs.

Building the schools suburbanites and ultimately Republicans want will add more debt service to the budget, Mitchell says, which will cause more tax hikes, so it is disingenuous for Republicans to advocate for the bonds but against tax hikes, then turn around and blame the Democrats for the tax hikes next year when commissioners are up for election.

“They (the Republicans) are complaining about tax increases and about school overcrowding,” said Mitchell. “Is that fair? They have used tax increases to beat us over the head for years. (Democrat Commissioners) Parks Helms, Wilhelmenia Rembert and Jennifer Roberts could be voted out because of the tax increase.

CL site is down. Creative Loafing April 27, 2005
Read the whole article from Creative Loafing

County Commissioner District 3 Valerie Woodard encourages people to speak up at a Board of County Commissioners public hearing on bonds, on Wednesday, Sept. 7 at 6 p.m. at the Government Center Meeting Chamber.

Voter specific issues

Voters were asked what the school board should cut from the CMS budget if money is tight. Here are their highest and lowest priorities, and thoughts on ways to raise more money.

For more money

• Strong opposition to raising property taxes.

…
School Board Ratings
Worst

• Effective spending.

• District vision.

• Public communication.

• Decisions based on children.

The nonprofit Charlotte Advocates for Education polled Mecklenburg voters this summer about CMS. Here are some of the findings.
Charlotte Observer Article