The money would only be used for facility improvement projects and not teacher or administrative salaries.
By Jonathan Friedman / Assistant Editor
At its meeting last Thursday, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Board of Education approved a $298 million bond measure that will be presented to voters in November. The bond must receive 55 percent approval for passage, and it would be used to pay for facility improvements. It cannot be used for teacher and administrative salaries or other nonfacility improvement purposes.
This year, through a series of meetings, the school district has been working on forming a Facilities Master Plan that would be a guide for the improvements the district’s facilities need. Consultants hired by the district gathered the opinions of parents and others involved as to what they believed was needed for the schools over the next 20 years. The official plan is supposed to be finalized in the fall. The bond money would be used to pay for some of these improvements.
Some of the necessary improvements specified by the board included removing asbestos from buildings, repairing leaky roofs and deteriorating bathrooms, and improving computer technology.
The bond would cost homeowners an annual sum of $30 per $100,000 of assessed value of the property.
Earlier this year, the school board formed a committee of local residents that studied the feasibility of putting a bond measure on the ballot. It also hired the firm Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin and Associates to conduct a survey that would determine the likelihood the community would support a measure. According to the school district, the firm discovered through a 25-minute telephone survey of 500 likely voters that a $400 million bond would be supported at a cost to taxpayers of no more than $30 per $100,000 of assessed property value.
A $400 million bond over a nearly two-decade period was originally proposed. But district staff recommended that a smaller amount of time with a smaller amount of money would be a better concept to get the work done with a solid, focused plan. And the district would have to be careful not to have a bond generating more money than it could spend, because a bond surplus would lead to a higher tax burden. Some board members supported a $298 million amount, but the $268 million bond received unanimous approval.
In order to pay for the 20-year master plan, another bond measure will eventually need to come before voters in the coming years.
The bond measure will be placed on an already crowded ballot that includes at least nine statewide measures and at least four in the city of Santa Monica, including a $84 annual parcel tax that would pay for Santa Monica Bay restoration and an initiative that would make adult marijuana use a low priority for the police department. The city of Malibu has no measures going before voters in November.
The bond measure language must be submitted to the county by Friday. Arguments for and against it are due by Aug. 21 and rebuttals to those arguments are due on Aug. 31.