‘Major Flaw’ Sank Simi Bond Issue : School Chief Says His Decision May Have Brought Defeat

A $35-million bond issue might have won approval if plans for follow-up calls to potential absentee voters had not been halted, Simi Valley School Superintendent John Duncan said.

Duncan called his decision to curtail the follow-up calls from campaign volunteers the “major flaw” of the school district’s campaign to win passage of the bond issue. The issue needed a “yes” vote on two-thirds of the ballots. It got slightly less than that, 64.5%, or 4,643 of 7,199 votes cast.

In a somber presentation to the five-member Board of Education Tuesday night, Duncan stressed that the school district must find a way to pay for rehabilitating Simi Valley’s 27 schools, which are an average of 25 years old.

But Duncan indicated that November might be too soon to hold another bond election. “I do not believe local bond issues at this time are readily acceptable. . . ,” he said.

Absentee ballots were requested by 3,392 voters in Simi Valley, according to the Ventura County Registrar’s Office, but only 2,363 absentee ballots were returned. The vast majority of those who returned absentee ballots, 78.7%, voted for to the bond issue.

“In other words, someplace, siting on coffee tables and dressers, sitting in drawers and on bookshelves, are 1,000 unused ballots,” Duncan said.

Duncan said he believed that if a telephone campaign to reach absentee voters had been continued, the 470 extra “yes” votes needed to pass the bond issue would have been cast.

“We ran out of steam,” he told the school board members. “We thought we had it in the bag. We tried to freeze the ball.”

The district had hoped to use $22 million in bond money to install air-conditioning and heating units in many of the schools and to use $4 million to repair blacktop and install sprinkler systems at the campuses.

Some money can be raised without another bond issue, but not nearly enough, Duncan said. He suggested that the district sell four school buildings, which are rented to private groups. He also proposed that the district seek private donations from parents of school children in a “sort of barn-raising type plan.”

School board member Lew Roth said the next step toward obtaining rehabilitation funds will be the subject of the school board’s May 3 meeting.

The erroneous belief that several alternative sources of funding for capital improvements are available also contributed to the bond issue’s defeat, Duncan said.

The “condition of the schools remains the same. They will worsen in the ‘88-’89 school year, the bill will become more expensive” and schools “will be increasingly unreparable.”

School board members had blamed the defeat of the bond issue on the Enterprise, a local newspaper that published a critical guest column and letters just before the election.