Santa Clarita Schools Defer Bond Measure After Survey

Santa Clarita Valley high school trustees, discouraged by a poll that showed voters would support only a limited tax increase to build schools, have decided to wait at least a year before asking the public to pass a bond measure for badly needed new schools.

“It did not seem to me that it would be in our best interest to look at a bond issue right now,” Clyde Smyth, superintendent of the William S. Hart Union High School District, said Wednesday.

On Tuesday night, the Hart trustees agreed with Smyth that the district should launch a campaign to educate the public about the district’s needs and the possible fund-raising methods to pay for land and new buildings.

That Hart proposal will be discussed by the Santa Clarita Valley Trustees Assn., composed of trustees from the Hart district, the valley’s four elementary school districts and one community college district.

The poll, released last Friday, surveyed 600 randomly selected voters in the Santa Clarita Valley.

It found that $50 to $60 was the maximum amount of additional property tax that two-thirds of the voters would be willing to pay each year to build schools. Bond measures need the approval of two-thirds of the voters to pass.

But Santa Clarita Valley school officials estimated that it would cost property owners $300 a year to finance $400 million in bonds the six districts would need to build schools over the next 20 years.

“It’s disappointing, but I’m not surprised,” Smyth said of the poll results. Tax measures always encounter opposition, and in Santa Clarita many residents believe that developers should pay more to build schools, he said.

In November a proposed bond measure to raise $275 million for new roads in the Santa Clarita Valley failed miserably, winning only 4,000 of 19,714 votes cast. The bond measure would have increased annual property tax bills between $75 and $200.