No school construction tax this fall
By Kevin Kelley
Westlake
Published Aug. 12, 2009

The Westlake Board of Education has decided against asking voters to fund the construction of a new high school and renovated middle school this November.

Board members came to a consensus on the issue at a meeting Monday.

Several board members had been skeptical of the wisdom of a ballot issue this fall due to the sluggish economy. The limited amount of time available to mount an effective campaign to convince homeowners to pay more taxes was also cited.

But the appeal of a November ballot issue grew in recent months when interest-free bonds became available to Ohio schools as part of the federal stimulus bill passed by Congress in February. The catch was that the bonds had to be distributed by the end of this year. If substantial savings was possible through the interest-free bonds, the reasoning went, it might be worth the effort to seek voter funding of new schools this November.

But although the Ohio School Facilities Commission approved the district’s application for the stimulus bonds, the amount approved was substantially less than district officials had hoped for.

The commission allocated a minimum of $3.23 million and a maximum of $7.62 million of interest-free bonds. The allocation would have been dependent on Westlake voters approving a capital levy. The final amount would have depended on how many other Ohio districts’ funding issues were also successful.

“We were hoping that the savings would have been between $10 and 16 million,” Superintendent Dan Keenan said at Monday’s board meeting. Instead, under the amount of bonds allocated, the savings in interest payments over time would have likely been less than $800,000, he said.

The Westlake Schools applied for $20 million in interest-free bonds, the maximum amount. Thirty-eight of 39 districts seeking bonds for projects still requiring voter approval were granted allocations. This wide dispersal of the bond money dashed Westlake’s hopes of substantial savings. No district in the state received the amount Westlake requested, Keenan said.

Still, board members said it was worth it to pursue the interest-free bonds.

“We had a responsibility to the community to look into this,” Board members Tim Sullivan said.

District officials have been pursuing options to address what they say are aging and overcrowded school buildings for several years. Those efforts will continue, board members said. Keenan said the district should now aim to place a funding issue before voters in May.

“It’s a question of timing, and right now the timing is not right,” Sullivan said, noting that Ohio’s unemployment rate is above 10 percent.

“It just doesn’t make sense to go forward now,” board member Carol Winter said.

But Tom Mays said there’s never really a good time to ask voters for more money. He warned fellow board members that the district should not delay addressing its facilities problems much longer

On average, school levies fail around 60 percent of the time in Ohio, Mays noted.

“That trend is not going to change by springtime,” he said. The board has to be prepared to aggressively lobby the public to fund new school buildings, he said.

On the Web:

• Westlake City Schools

Previous West Life articles:

• Committee calls for new school buildings (Jan. 28, 2009)
• Public forums to address aging school buildings (Sept. 17, 2008)