Opinion: $7 billion for....what was that exactly?
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As the Times editorial board noted today, L.A. school officials might not have realized the legal thicket they were entering when their $3.2 billion school bond suddenly blossomed to $7 billion. No matter how many goodies they piled into the list, they simply don’t have $7 billion worth of need at this point, so the summary of projects lists $1.3 billion for future, unspecified repair work, half a billion for cloudy modernization and technology projects and nearly a quarter of a billion for yet-to-be-idenitified green construction.
Problem is that Proposition 39, which voters passed in 2000, allows bonds to pass with 55% approval but requires the school districts to list specifically which construction and equipment the money will pay for. That was one of the safeguards built into the proposition to soothe nervous taxpayers about this incursion into Prop. 13’s guarantee that such measures could pass only with a two-thirds vote.
To understand this, think back to what was going on with California schools at the time. With bulging enrollments from the echo boom, and decades of deferred maintenance after the passage of Proposition 13, schools were truly falling apart. Athletic fields had been taken over by portable classrooms that were themselves growing decrepit. Cracked and potholed walkways and playgrounds threatened children’s safety, and teachers placed plastic garbage pails under the leaks in the ceilings to catch the water whenever it rained. Proposition 39 was, in essence, a sort of emergency measure under which, by listing exactly how many classrooms would be built at a certain campus or which sagging fences would be repaired, schools could stop looking like a street’s derelict neighbor. Only a situation that dire could bring make voters willing to tax themselves more easily.
It’s quite possible the school district will scramble now to come up with a list of projects. The question is, how believable will that be after they openly admitted that at least $2 billion of the bonds will go to projects they haven’t even dreamed of yet? Or, as staff writer Howard Blume write in his news story last week:
‘This bond, by contrast, contains a wide-ranging wish list of possible expenditures that backers say would create state-of-the-art ‘small’ schools with the potential to improve graduation rates and test scores.’
Should the district have stuck with the $3.2 billion? Skipped this election altogether to build a solid list of projects for a $7 billion bond? Should it try for a two-thirds vote so it doesn’t have to have a specific list of projects? Or should it quickly make a list, don’t bother with checking it twice, and hope nobody challenges it?