[Vision2020] something for the table

[joanopyr at earthlink.net]

Melynda writes:

"I'm perplexed by what a next step in this business might be.  A larger bond will, of course, be completely unacceptable to many people in the community.   A couple of small bonds?  The first one might go, but I bet the second one wouldn't.  And how to decide which project to take on first?  *Any* bond will be unacceptable to a sufficient number of people to create something of a challenge. 

I'm afraid we are headed down the road that Troy has walked, and we will find ourselves with a condemned school building, no funding, and a community that's unwilling to pay the ever-growing cost of solving the problem."

I, for one, would not support a bond that included only renovations of Russell and West Park and/or mere Band-Aid work on the current high school.  I also don't think it likely that the district would (or legally could -- could it?) declare eminent domain on the homes adjacent to the 1938 high school.  If in some parallel universe the district had that power, I would oppose seizing those homes from their current owners, no matter what if they paid "fair market price," and knocking them to the ground.  (FYI, in eminent domain cases, fair market price is often above the actual sale value of the property, hurt feelings tending to be factored in.)  The Trail site was 40 empty acres; building a new high school there might have inconvenienced Janice Willard, but it would have displaced no one.  That was one of the reasons I supported the bond -- that and the fact that 40 acres allows for playing fields and future school expansion.  Even if we were to flatten the homes around the h!
 igh school downtown -- what a cruel thought -- there's not enough land there for either reasonable expansion or adequate playing fields.

As far as remodels of Russell and West Park are concerned, I think we've shot that wad.  Interest rates are on the way up, and those buildings are on the way down.  It is already the case that it would be cheaper and more efficient to abandon both and build a new elementary at the Joseph Street site.  I would be sorry to see that happen; my extended family has an emotional attachment to both of those schools (Russell in particular), but in order to pass any new facilities bond, it would have to be marketed as the wisest possible use of taxpayers' money.  Otherwise, we can expect many more lovely graphs, pie charts, and squiggly up-and-down lined pictures to appear in the Daily News courtesy of Jack Wenders and company.  Don't imagine that Wenders and Dale Courtney -- who are in this fight to promote one agenda and one agenda only, the complete dismantling of public education -- wouldn't go to their usual lengths to demonstrate just how we the taxpayers are being ripped off b!
 y "paleo-hippies" who have a fiscally foolish, purely sentimental attachment to public education and inefficient old buildings.

To be honest, Aaron, I don't see the Moscow School Board or the Facilities Planning Committee agreeing to cobble together a new bond either this summer or next fall.  It took the FPC two years worth of wrangling to put together the compromise proposal that the voters have just rejected.  As Superintendent Donicht told the Daily News, there is no Plan B.  Plan A, the April 26th bond, was the only thing in the pipeline, and we soundly rejected it.  I think we can safely assume that any new facilities bond won't be happening next fall; it will have to take place sometime in the more distant future, after the existing facilities bond is retired in 2006.  That means that it will have to overcome the additional hurdle of being perceived as a "new tax."  Moscow School District's voters' taxes will drop as soon as the old levy expires, and we know from experience that people tend to get used to paying less, and they tend to like it.  Overcoming that obstacle will be daunting, to say!
  the least.

I think we've blown it here, Aaron.  I really do.  No, I don't think the April 26th plan was ideal (I've never made that claim) but it was what was on the menu.  Call me a pessimist, but I don't think we're going to get anything better; I don't think we're going to get anything else at all.  It's kind of like when I was a kid and my mother cooked liver and onions for supper.  I didn't like it, but there wasn't a Dinner B.  I could eat the liver or go sulk in my bedroom.

As my mother loved liver and onions, I did a lot of sulking as a kid.  

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment
www.auntie-establishment.com
  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20050428/e574319d/attachment.htm