Project 2 is a roughly $102 million Physical Education addition with a pool area so large that part of the structurally-sound building must be demolished and rebuilt to make room for it. A vote is expected on April 27, the final business meeting for three outgoing members. You — the voters and taxpayers of District 200 — can help stop them from gambling with your money and the high school’s future.
Three funding options are on the table, ranging from the best practice of putting all borrowing to referendum (Option 1) to the risky proposal with 20-year debt certificates (Option 2).
Option 2 is controversial for a few reasons. It would bypass voter approval without recourse to petition to put the funding on the ballot. Voters successfully petitioned the board’s 2015 non-referendum bonds to fund a pool. Debt certificates are generally used when an urgent expenditure can’t be covered by a school’s cash reserve. There’s no petition process for debt certificates because they’re intended for emergencies, like a leaking roof.
Debt certificates are controversial — and inadvisable — because they are repaid from operating budgets. Option 2 requires the gamble that the operating budget for the next 20 years will cover the annual repayment without impacting operations and student services.
Under Illinois law, a school board can increase its annual levy for operations by up to 5% or the Consumer Price Index (CPI) increase, whichever is less. Over the last 10 years, CPI growth has ranged from 0.7% to 7.0%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.* There is no reliable way to forecast CPI beyond a few years.
Impacts to future budgets include the teachers’ contract that will be negotiated several times, and the possibility that the state may shift the burden of teachers’ pensions onto schools, which would severely impact budgets.
If the board follows OPRF’s Community Finance Committee’s guidance and best practices, it will eliminate Option 2 from consideration.
Please email the board (boe@oprfhs.org), several of whom have said in the past that such expenditures should go to referendum [See Bob Skolnik’s story in this week’s News section]. Remind them that taxpayers made it clear that they want to vote on major capital projects in a 2020 advisory referendum.
Tell the board there should be no gambling with funding for high school operations.
Judith Alexander, Marty Bernstein, Jack Davidson, Amanda Massie, Jack Powers, Jean Powers, Jack Sheehan, Monica Sheehan, Jeff Sobczynski, Leslie Sutphen
Oak Park
* U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: The December percentage is used for setting the annual levy. https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/data/consumerpriceindexhistorical_us_table.htm