elpasospeak

A statement that is made multiple times in the facilities advisory committee information that was sent to us is:

“No one in this room will get everything they want, but everyone in this room will get something they want.”

Really?

Evidently the strategy of the facilitators is to see to it that everyone will get something and thus everyone will vote to approve the issuance of the bonds.

How about

“This is the money that we need to spend to improve the quality of our children’s education”?

Pandering to the voters is shameful and they should be ashamed.

Why can’t they just ask us for the money that is really necessary, not money to buy votes.

We deserve better

Brutus

This slide was part of the June 29, 2016 presentation made to the EPISD facilities advisory committee:

The chart shows that their tax rates have been stable since 2008 with the exception of a voter approved bump in 2016.

Most of us would call that doing a good job.

During most of that period the district was paralyzed by the administration and board scandals that we feel are past us at this point.

Brutus

The $500 or $600 or $700 million that the district will end  up asking us to vote for cannot be handled by the district in a span of time that makes it reasonable to give them that much money.  Once we give it to them future boards will be free to “repurpose” it as circumstances change.  They have done it in the past and will do it again.

As a case in point please remember that in 2007 we voted to give them $207 million.

Take a look at this June 29, 2016 presentation to the current facilities advisory committee:

Nine years after we voted to give them money they are still “In Design” for major projects.

EPISD tells us that changing demographics are causing them to have to close and consolidate schools.

If nine years after allowing $207 million the district has not even begun projects, what can we expect if we give them five or six or seven hundred million dollars today?

Their financial calculations (such as they are) assume that they will issue all of the new debt at today’s interest rate.  The only way to guarantee that would be to sell all of the bonds immediately and thus have us pay interest on money that we cannot use because the construction planning and building process at EPISD cannot schedule all of their proposed projects at once.

The safer way for the public to do this is to grant the issuance of a significantly smaller sum of bonds and then watch to see if the district can complete the projects that we vote for in a reasonable period of time and with reasonable costs.

EPISD should ask for less money and then come back to the voters in following years if they have handled our money wisely.

Stay tuned over the next few days as we point out other problems with their plans as they stand now.  Once again, our goal at this point is to try to help the school board see what we perceive to be problems with what the district is considering so that a reasonable bond referendum can be offered to the voters.

We deserve better

Brutus

As we know, the EPISD is making plans to have a bond authorization election in November of 2016.

We received copies of presentations made to the district’s facilities advisory committee in the past few weeks from an anonymous source.

The presentations give us an opportunity to review what they are considering and what they have been told, so get ready to read a lot about the issues in coming days on this blog.  The posts will be considered to be negative by some and positive by others.

Please let me start by saying once again that I think EPISD needs some bond money and that I think that the current board and their new president are doing a much better job than their predecessors.

We differ on the what, how much, when and why of what they are talking about.

Hopefully we can use this blog to generate honest, impersonal discussion about the topic before final decisions are made by the committee.

Stay tuned

We deserve better

Brutus