School District Sells Construction Bonds

The Conejo Valley Unified School District has made quick work of selling $30 million worth of Measure R school construction bonds.

The general-obligation bonds entered the market at 9:30 a.m. Friday with the sale finalized by noon.

“Nearly $6 million worth of [bond] purchase orders were in before the market opened,” said Gary Mortimer, assistant superintendent of business services, who attended the sale in Los Angeles.

“It means that they are getting a good financial deal,” Mortimer said. “With interest rates this low, we are saving the community quite a bit of money. We are very happy with the sale.”

Mortimer said the sale of the bonds went so well that the yield, or interest paid to investors when the bonds mature, dropped by half a percentage point during the sale. The yield for the 14-year series bonds ranges from 3.15% for those maturing in 2000 to 4.6% for those maturing in 2013.

Mortimer said it would take some time to calculate how the strong sale of the bonds would affect the checkbooks of district residents when they pay their property taxes. However, he said, the deal was engineered to ensure that residents would not pay more than $29 per $100,000 of assessed property value.

The district is now designing new classrooms for kindergarten class-size reduction, a swimming pool and tennis courts at Westlake High, four new middle school gymnasiums and drainage improvements at Thousand Oaks High.

This summer, the district will restore restrooms, roofs and parking lots on its way to completing 140 projects totaling $14 million during the next 18 months.

In all, $88 million worth of bonds will be sold.