It might be time to get used to the acronym “MUSD.”
The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) could be a thing of the past, replaced by the Malibu Unified School District — at least according to findings by the district’s Financial Oversight Committee (FOC), which presented its report to the school board on Wednesday, July 15.
FOC members, who spent the last year studying two of the nine criteria for school district separation set forth by the State of California, gave a tentative “OK” to separation last Wednesday.
The committee broke into two subcommittees to tackle the two criteria — one studying assets and liabilities and the other studying annual operating budgets. Each team found one potential “deal breaker” for separation.
The final report for the Review of Separate District Financial Information (annual operating budget) Subcommittee, read, “The only potential ‘deal breaker’ is the need for a new MUSD Parcel Tax.”
“We concluded that there’s only one potential ‘deal breaker,’ and that is that Malibu must adopt its own parcel tax,” Committee Chair Shelly Slaugh Nahass told school board members during the meeting. “Independence advocates in Malibu clearly intend to ask the voters to do that.”
The parcel tax, which, according to committee member Paul Silvern, has never been passed in Malibu, should not increase tax rates.
“Just to clarify, are you saying the people of Malibu would have to pay more taxes in order to make this work?” asked board member Craig Foster. Foster, a Malibu resident and former president of the nonprofit Advocates for Malibu Public Schools (AMPS), has long been an outspoken advocate for district separation.
“No, we are saying they’d have to pass — which they have never done heretofore — a parcel tax, which is equivalent to the tax they pay today,” Silvern replied. “But it would have to be passed by a two-thirds margin.”
Because of the small size of Malibu’s potential new district, the parcel tax will tie the MUSD budget to property tax revenue, rather than attendance, which could mean smaller class sizes in Malibu schools.
“The assumption moving forward … is that Malibu Unified would have … the same number of permit students?” asked Board Member Ralph Mechur.
“What it will change in the case of Malibu, because their revenue is not dependent on the case of attendance, it’s dependent on property taxes, they would actually have a smaller student body to educate,” replied district Chief Financial Officer Jan Maez.
The final report for the Division of Assets/Liabilities Subcommittee, which was provided to The Malibu Times earlier in July, reported its potential “deal breaker” is the ongoing lawsuit brought against the district by America Unites, formerly Malibu Unites. The suit is meant to pressure the district to hasten remediation efforts for toxins found at Malibu High School and Juan Cabrillo Elementary.
“We think it’s imperative that the district retain legal counsel to look at our conclusions,” said Silvern. “There are a lot of questions … that have to get resolved in terms of how certain assets and certain liabilities get allocated.
“Our conclusion was that those can be resolved. We didn’t see anything critical in those that couldn’t be.”
A handful of community members came to praise the FOC for its studies, including current AMPS president Karen Farrer.
“We all appreciate the time and effort that you put in,” Farrer told the committee, later adding, “The people of Malibu are completely serious about this issue, and we continue to work toward separation on a weekly basis.”