Filling the Cracks: Residents to Vote Soon on 10-Year, $33 Million Facilities Tax, Two Years After Approving $49.7 Million Bond

By Andrea Gates, The Times-News, Twin Falls, Idaho

Mar. 2–Voters in the Twin Falls School District will go to the polls March 11 to determine if the school district will extend its long-standing — but soon to expire — facilities levy.

School officials say the money is needed to maintain the district’s dozen aging schools, which need more than $33 million in repairs and upgrades over the next decade.

The proposal has been endorsed by the Twin Falls Area Chamber of Commerce, and by a parent-teacher organization.

There is no organized opposition, but district officials face a major obstacle to winning at the polls: Two years ago, in March 2006, voters narrowly approved a $49.7 million bond issue, largely to build a new senior high school.

With interest, that bond will cost taxpayers almost $74 million by the time it is paid off in 2025.

Some homeowners say they’ve paid enough.

“As a homeowner whose property taxes were recently increased by 25 percent, I don’t care to hear anymore about the wants and needs of the school system,” Twin Falls resident Tony Salierno wrote in a recent letter to the Times-News.

To help win over voters in 2006, the district administration promised to use about $12 million of the bond issue to also repair and upgrade other schools.

The bad news came at Christmas.

With Canyon Ridge High School now under construction, district officials say that bids for construction and materials are far higher than anticipated.

According to current district estimates, the high school alone could cost $47.5 million, leaving too little money to fulfill the bond levy campaign promises.

The district has said it will be forced to scale back the project, sell property, shift some promised school repairs to the extended facilities levy or to delay some of the work.

“Unfortunately, no one could have projected the rapid acceleration of prices,” said Superintendent Wiley Dobbs.

Exactly how the district will react if voters reject the facilities levy is unknown. A School Board member warned of cuts, but district officials won’t discuss specifics.

They will, however, point to specific needs, such as $4.7 million necessary to fix seven roofs. Many other projects cited by the district are modest, such as re-tiling the Twin Falls High locker rooms and sealing cracks in O’Leary Junior High’s asphalt running track.

Status quo or windfall?

In letters to the editor, PowerPoint presentations to civic groups and postings on the district’s Web site, Dobbs and others hammer home the facilities levy’s key selling point: it “will not increase the combined bond and plant facilities tax rate.”

If approved by a supermajority of voters, the facilities tax would go from 29 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value to about $1.27 per $1,000, if the district’s net taxable market value remains constant.

District officials stress, however, that the total combined facilities bond and plant facilities levy rate — currently $2.38 per $1,000 — would not increase because the state will pick up a larger share of bond payments starting next year.

Bear Bangs, president of O’Leary’s Parent Teacher Student Organization, said he’s seen the presentation and strongly supports the levy.

“It’s something that’s not going to raise taxes as we see them now,” Bangs said.

And on Feb. 22 the Chamber of Commerce told its members that “This proposed levy will not increase the current tax rate for property owners.”

But that doesn’t mean taxpayers won’t pay more for this levy alone.

Over the past 10 years, the district took in $6.4 million in plant facilities levy revenue.

If voters approve the new levy, the district could collect five times as much — about $33 million — over the next 10 years. Even while the total rate may remain constant, the yield from this levy alone will grow because the net market value of property in the district in recent years has ballooned — 34 percent last year alone, according to the County Assessor’s Office.

Passage of the plant facilities levy would mean a tax of $140 per year to the owner of a home assessed at $200,000 with a homeowner’s exemption of $89,325.

But if the proposal is rejected, that same homeowner would see a savings of about $32 per year because the current, smaller levy would expire.

Promises at the polls

When boosters were campaigning for the high school bond in 2006 they circulated pamphlets that listed the cost of Canyon Ridge High at $37.6 million, with $12.1 million of the bond issue going for “renovation and reconfiguration” of nine other schools.

Those improvement projects weren’t specified on the ballot, however, and district officials now say there are no guarantees in light of higher bills for the new high school.

“The district may have to delay some projects, and a limited number of the maintenance-related projects may be funded from the plant facilities levy over an extended period of time,” School Board Chairman Bryan Matsuoka wrote in a letter published by the Times-News.

When asked which projects would be affected, Dobbs responded via e-mail with the same statement.

But Dobbs and others pledge that none of the proposed plant facilities revenue will be used to cover expected Canyon Ridge cost overruns, because it won’t be needed.

When asked if he thought voters wouldn’t approve spending more money on the new high school project, but would want to spend more on repair and upgrades at other schools, Dobbs said he didn’t know.

Dobbs didn’t respond to a question of why the new high school and repairs at other schools are being treated as seperate political issues.

Dobb’s cost-overrun projection is much lower than figures cited by Dale Thornsberry, the district’s facilities manager.

By Thornsberry’s count, the project is likely to finish about $9.9 million over budget, or about $47.5 million — all but $2.2 million of the bond issue — for a 219,716-square foot facility at $216 per foot.

Why the difference?

The higher number includes all costs, including unavoidable charges for site preparation, engineering, design and management fees.

While the district pledges not to use the plant facilities levy for Canyon Ridge, voters are being asked to give broad authority in how much money the board will collect and how it will be spent. The board would be authorized to collect as much as $3.3 million per year for 10 years starting July 1. According to the ballot language, the board could use the money to construct, furnish and equip schools, buy school sites, make improvements to existing buildings, purchase school buses, pay lease agreements or pay off construction loans for new buildings. Nothing is said about Canyon Ridge.

When voters last were presented with a plant facilities levy, in 1998, the ballot language was just as general but it specified an exact amount of $509,792 to be collected in the first year, with a 5 percent increase each year until 2008.

Maintenance budget

Another selling point in the levy campaign is a statement that the school district is known statewide for wisely managing its facilities.

“Chamber (of Commerce) folks say that new people coming in make those kinds of comments,” Matsuoka said when asked the source of that assessment.

The district says it has spent more than $31 million on facilities over the past 10 years, including plant facilities levy revenue. But it is not immediately clear exactly how the money was spent. When asked for an accounting, the district provided broad descriptions with expenditures grouped in general terms such as “supplies and materials,”"purchased services” and “supplies-maintenance.”

Under state law school districts are required to allot a specific amount of money each year to maintain and repair student-occupied buildings.

In arguing the need for the continued facilities levy, district officials say that complying with this law means they should set aside $33 million over the next decade, or four percent of the cost of replacing all district buildings.

But the state only requires districts to put aside two percentï¿ 1/2 ï¿ 1/2 ” in this case, $15.15 million. The four percent figure is a high-end recommendation.

Andrea Gates can be reached at 735-3380 or Andrea.Gates@lee.net

—–

To see more of The Times-News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.magicvalley.com

Copyright (c) 2008, The Times-News, Twin Falls, Idaho

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.