School District to Ask for More Funds

After Fillmore Unified School District launched Ventura County’s first successful school bond measure since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, Superintendent Marlene Davis’ phone wouldn’t stop ringing with inquiries from other superintendents hoping to follow in her footsteps.

Now, 18 months after the $5-million bond issue, Davis is in the spotlight again, but this time for less exhilarating reasons.

She is in the uncomfortable position of explaining why Fillmore voters, who still don’t have a new junior high school, are being asked to approve another $8 million in bonds for it.

“It’s hard to come back the second time,” she said. “The question always is, ‘Why didn’t you do it right the first time?’ ”

The answer is a long and tortuous tale of poor planning and bad luck, of escalating land values and encroaching growth, but it has failed to stir sympathy among some Fillmore voters.

“I think the community feels like they’ve been duped, and they’re very upset and rightfully so,” said Gary Creagle, a former mayor of Fillmore. To encourage opposition to the measure, Creagle has hung a banner in the window of his Central Avenue gun shop, Up in Arms.

Test Scores

Referring to the 3,300-student district’s scores on California Assessment Placement tests, which last year ranked well below the state average and in several areas within the lowest 5%, it reads: “Property taxes higher, higher. Grades, scores lower, lower.”

Another Fillmore resident, Jerry Fisk, last week launched a separate attack. A retired hospital worker, he gathered signatures from 34 residents on a letter to the editor of the Fillmore Herald, a local weekly newspaper, expressing opposition.

“I feel that they’ll somehow find the money to build the school if it’s needed,” Fisk said in an interview. “The newspapers say there’s a surplus of $2.3 billion in the state budget and a good portion of it will go into schools. There’s a lot of money right there.”

While Davis acknowledges that the school district may receive money from the budget surplus identified earlier this month, she said the amount “won’t be anything like big-time money to complete a school. It’s nothing we can plan on.”

Instead, school district officials are banking on 250 volunteers to walk precincts before the election and ferry voters to polls Tuesday.

The volunteers are telling voters that if the bond measure doesn’t pass, the district will have only enough money to build a library, an outdoor eating “pavilion” and a gymnasium on property acquired with funds from the first bonds.

5-Minute Walk

The district’s 550 junior high school students will have to make a five-minute walk from their present campus--where conditions are so cramped that they spill into 18 trailers--to avail themselves of the new facilities.

As it is, students at Fillmore Junior High School walk across Second Street to eat in the cafeteria of Fillmore High School because their school doesn’t have one.

Davis traces the conflict to the school board’s decision in the spring of 1987 to begin acquiring property for several schools before developers, who Davis said were “circling the town,” could snap it up.

After taking the superintendent’s job months later, Davis encountered resistance to the idea of a bond solely for land acquisition, rather than school construction.

“People were saying, ‘What sites, where and how much?’ ” she said.

Rather than drop the measure from the November, 1987, ballot, school board members decided to alter their campaign, instead earmarking the money not only for acquiring property but also for building a new school, she said.

While they always knew that the $5 million would not cover all the funds associated with the construction, the officials believed that most of the remaining costs could be covered with state funds for growing districts, Davis said.

Based on the district’s growth of 1% to 2% annually, district officials calculated that they could expect $1.3 million from the state to construct the school’s 13 classrooms, with the bond money covering costs for the land and the other school facilities.

Rising Costs

But no sooner did Fillmore’s voters approve the bond measure by a 70% margin, than the project’s costs began to escalate, Davis said.

The district hired an architect who convinced the district that $1.3 million would not cover the cost of building classrooms. Property costs, which had been pegged at $800,000, jumped by at least another $500,000, Davis said.

The district’s problems were compounded when state matching funds for school construction in growing districts dried up. By the time they were restored, Fillmore no longer qualified; for the first time in five years, the district was shrinking, with a loss of about 100 students due to the shutdown of the nearby Rancho Sespe farm labor camp.

Officials expect the district to resume its growth in the next school year, but the state requires a full year’s growth before districts can qualify for matching funds, Davis said.

By February, the Little District That Could realized that it wouldn’t be able to after all, and Davis found herself following in her own footsteps, waging a campaign for the perennially unpopular move of increasing taxes.

Larger School

Now the district calculates that it needs an additional $8 million to cover the cost of constructing the school, which would be larger than the one originally envisioned. Designed to hold the 1,100 junior high school students that the district is projected to have after the year 2000, the school would have 40 classrooms when completed in 1991.

In exchange, Fillmore voters would have to agree to incur an additional tax of $110 on property valuations of $100,000.

Combined, the two bonds would bring the total increase in property taxes to $171 per $100,000 valuation in 1991, the bonds’ peak year. Afterward, taxes would steadily decrease over the life of the 25-year bond. In 2014, for instance, they would be $69.