A Tale of Two School Bond Issues

As school officials in Laguna Beach basked in the glow of their $39-million school bond victory in Tuesday’s special election, school district officials in Huntington Beach were left pondering the failure of their $25-million bond measure and considering what their next steps will be to fund the repair and upgrading of the city’s aging schools.

The Laguna Beach Unified School District’s bond proposal earned 80.3% of the vote, the highest percentage of any of the eight school bond measures passed by county voters since 1998.

The Huntington Beach City School District’s bond measure, however, received 62.1%, short of the needed two-thirds.

“We got a majority and came very close,” Bill Wallace, campaign coordinator for Citizens for Better Elementary Schools, said Wednesday. “All I can say is the community was not ready to focus on the needs of the schools now.”

“It’s just awfully difficult to get 66 2/3 of the electorate to raise their taxes, basically,” added school board member Brian Garland. And even though less than 25% of district residents have school-age children, he said, “I think the fact that we had almost 63% [of the vote] shows that there was strong support for what we said we needed.”

Because most of the district’s schools are 30 or more years old, supporters said, they need new roofs, plumbing, electrical, heating and air-conditioning systems and various repairs. One of the district’s 10 schools, built in 1934, still has its original boiler system.

The defeat Tuesday marks the second failed school bond attempt in the city since 1999, when the Huntington Beach Union High School District’s $123-million bond measure lost with 61% of the vote.

Although school bond measures need 66.6% of the vote to win in special elections, the passage of Proposition 39 last year requires just 55% for bonds to win in general elections.

Garland said the board originally discussed the possibility of waiting for a general election to put the bond measure on the ballot. But because Orange County voters largely rejected Proposition 39, he said, “The feeling of the board was that to keep faith with our own community, we’d go out and try to convince them that they should support [the bond] at 66 2/3.”

Garland said he expects the board to discuss putting another bond measure on the ballot in the March general election. “The needs are still there, and we need to provide for these kids,” he said.

Supporters of the bond measures in both districts did what they could to drum up support.

Operating on a budget of $128,000 donated by businesses and individuals, the Committee for Laguna Beach Schools hired a political consultant and a statistical- and voter-data supplier. The committee sent direct mailings to 12,000 registered voters in the district who were identified as most likely to go to the polls, and a phone bank contacted more than 11,000 voters.

In Huntington Beach, Citizens for Better Elementary Schools operated on a budget of about $70,000 to pay for a consultant and spread its “Yes on Measure S” message via mailers and a phone bank.

“One problem you have in all these elections is that parents typically tend to vote less often than other people, maybe because they’re busy running kids here and there,” Wallace said. “Getting out that vote is always a problem.”

On that count, Huntington Beach had a bigger problem than Laguna Beach on Tuesday--a 19.3% voter turnout compared with 29% in Laguna.