Lancaster School Bond Measure Won’t Be on Ballot in November

Officials in the troubled Lancaster School District, where voters rejected a $47-million school bond measure only three months ago, decided Tuesday against a plan to place the same measure on the ballot again in November.

Some school board members and officials in the 10,800-student district had been considering another attempt to press voters for a tax hike.

But the district’s new superintendent, who started work only this week, persuaded the school board to wait for better times.

“The timing is not right for our district. We need an opportunity to develop some programs and do some things to have some positives,” Supt. David Alvarez said. In recent months, he said, the district has suffered a series of setbacks that have not fostered public confidence.

In particular, state officials recently said the district missed an application deadline that cost it eligibility for about $5 million in state school bond money.

And in a separate dispute, state officials are pressing the district to return $1 million to $2 million in state aid for having too many portable classrooms.

After a brief debate Tuesday night, the district’s board of trustees voted 5 to 0 to accept Alvarez’s recommendation.

The district’s aborted ballot measure would have cost the owner of a typical home, assessed at $150,000, an average of $60.53 a year for the 30-year life of the tax.

District officials felt they came close in the April 10 election when Measure A, their original $47-million general obligation bond measure, fell 570 votes short of passage out of 8,339 ballots cast.

The measure needed a two-thirds vote but got 59.8%.

School officials argued that they might have won the election if thousands of their campaign mailers had not gone undelivered. School officials blamed the Lancaster Post Office, but postal officials said the literature was mailed too late.

The mail dispute, combined with advice from the district’s consultants that a second election could be won, encouraged some school officials to try again on the Nov. 6 ballot.

But Alvarez said the recent setbacks would harm the measure’s chances this year, and the school board should reconsider the issue next year.