Voters’ Answer on School Tax in Mail : Valencia: An election is under way to determine if residents of an exclusive area will be assessed up to $925 annually for a new campus.

In a time of economic uncertainty, about the last thing anyone would expect is a group of people asking for their taxes to be increased.

Yet that is precisely what some residents of a Valencia neighborhood are proposing.

A group of homeowners in an area known as the Summit don’t like the fact that their children are divided between two schools. As a result, they want to create a special tax assessment district that will provide money to build a local elementary school.

The county is now conducting an election by mail on the $12-million bond measure among the 1,945 registered voters in the designated area.

If two-thirds of the voters approve the measure, residents’ taxes will increase between $230 and $925 annually for 25 years, depending on the size of their house or condominium.

“It’s very unusual,” said J. Michael McGrath, an elementary school superintendent in Newhall where explosive development has led to overcrowding.

“These are people, whether their neighbors agree or disagree with them, who put their money where their mouths were . . . I would regard the people who are proponents as rather rare.”

But the prospect of higher taxes for a neighborhood school has not been embraced by all area homeowners.

“There are limited funds and the question is, where is the best application of those funds?” said Roland Jaworski, who is active in opposing the proposed tax increase and feels the community is in greater need of a high school. “And I don’t believe an elementary school in the Summit is necessarily the answer.”

Also stirring opposition is the fact that only 200 of the proposed 600 students in the school will come from the Summit, the rest to be bused in from other parts of the district.

“So there’s a disparate burden for the homeowners in the Summit to solve the overcrowding problem for the whole district,” Jaworski said.

The district’s superintendent, who supports the move to build the new school, agrees.

“Four hundred kids from somewhere else are going to go there, and they’ll pay for it,” McGrath said. “This would be a lot easier to sell, I think, if there were 600 kids up there.”

Even Dave Hansen, who has spearheaded the drive to build the new school, agrees that it’s a hard sell.

“There are a lot of people up in the Summit who are opposed to it and don’t feel it’s fair. And I said to them the other night at a meeting, ‘You’re right, it isn’t fair,’ ” Hansen said. But, he added, we often pay taxes for which we receive no direct benefit. Besides, he said, “it’s better than doing nothing.”

As an additional hurdle, the school district will place a $20-million school construction bond on the June 4 ballot, and if it passes, Summit residents will have to pay that, too.

As a result, proponents of the new school face an uphill battle getting the required two-thirds majority in the election that will end Feb. 12. County officials expect to have the final results Feb. 14.

“Two-thirds under the best of circumstances is difficult,” McGrath said. “I would say it’s a possibility, but probably not probable.”

The move for a new school began about two years ago, when overcrowding led the board of trustees to redraw the school boundaries, cutting the Summit neighborhood in half. As a result, about half the Summit children who had been attending the nearby Valencia Valley elementary were bused to Old Orchard elementary in Newhall.

“It was really quite controversial,” Hansen said. “It didn’t leave a good taste in people’s mouths.”

A group of parents led by Hansen unsuccessfully lobbied the school district to build a new school in the Summit neighborhood. District officials said they didn’t have the money and, even if they did, they would build the school where the population density was higher.

In discussions with district officials, parents came up with the idea of using the Mello-Roos Community Facilities Act of 1982 to create a special tax assessment district.

Although normally used to provide adequate school facilities in new housing developments, it has been used in recent years by school districts who like the fact that voters are presented with a fixed taxation formula, rather than having the tax tied to the assessed value of their house, as in the more common General Obligation Bond, according to Lori Raineri, a school district consultant.

But most Mello-Roos bond elections have been districtwide. What is unique about the proposed Summit district is that the community and the school district are not just setting tax levels, but have actually designed the boundaries of a tax assessment district within the school district. There is only one other example of such a special district, in the Sacramento City Unified School District, where a neighborhood of 7,000 residents in 1987 passed a $9.5-million bond to build three schools.

To Hansen and the other parents, the idea of taxing themselves as homeowners made sense.

“First of all, we’ll get a school that’s within walking distance of the neighborhood, rather than getting bused,” Hansen said. Also, it seemed better to take some sort of action now, rather than wait years for state or local bond money to become available.

Finally, they wanted to make a contribution to the community by helping to relieve the severe overcrowding problem in the district. Hansen said the area is known for its quality schools “and we’d hate to see that deteriorate as they become more overcrowded.”

The homeowners approached the district with a petition containing more than 300 signatures, and collected $8,000 to help pay for the cost of researching and drawing up the district.

Now, both sides are engaging in low-key campaigns: No banners, few meetings, no political advertising.

“What we’ve tried to do is conduct a grass-roots campaign,” Hansen said. “We are making phone calls and contacting people on a person-by-person basis.” He said they are concentrating on people who are undecided or are likely to favor the new tax “rather than concentrate on the people who are opposed to it, to try to change their minds.”

Opponents are taking a similar approach. They are also canvassing the neighborhood, and Jaworski estimates they have covered 90% of the residences.

The election, however, has not been without controversy. The county inadvertently mailed out 228 ballots to voters outside the assessment district boundaries who were ineligible to vote. Those opposed to the school cried foul, and the county quickly acted to correct the mistake, mailing notices to those who should not have received the ballots and telling them to ignore the ballots.

County election officials are confident the error will not affect the integrity of the election. They said they will verify the signature on the envelope and cross-check each ballot with the voter rolls.

Despite strong feelings on both sides, Hansen and Jaworski both agreed that the election has not generated hostility between neighbors. “I certainly don’t feel it’s dividing the neighborhood, or anything like that,” Hansen said.

And Hansen remains optimistic.

“It’s always difficult to get two-thirds of the people to vote on anything,” let alone taxes, Hansen said. But he quickly added, “If we get the people who should be voting for it, I think we’ve got a good chance.”