That’s french and fifty cents for the result of being driven to not caring.
And that’s not me. My last posts were typed out starting at about 2AM on the fifth of the month, Ash Wednesday in the Christian calendar, the day after our school board meeting that was supposed to deal with the budget but that ended up giving it short shrift after a closed two hour meeting to discuss our teacher’s contract negotiations.
The serious of our situation strangled me until I woke up and wrote a series of posts each titled Chainsaw 1, 2, 3 etc.
That was about ten hours of on an off writing. Toward the end of the day just before our Ash Wednesday church service I took them off the blog. Hysteria never helps anything and my posts were a form of my own panic. Surely, my thinking went and still goes, if we face our difficulties head on we will deal with them better than if we ignore them or run away. I’d rather have a crocodile lunge at my head giving me the chance to pound my fist on his snout than try to swim away and have him grab me by my ass and start his death rolls.
I thought I felt better after deleting my chainsaws but it took a full and night of reflection till my composure fully returned.
On Thursday my poor sick Claudia rode to the Twin Cities to attend two days worth of seminary classes and I was free to work on our school budget. I’ve been collecting reams of data on our past budgets trying to understand them in the microscopic way an accountant looks at balance sheets and in the macroscopic way a good investor looks at an investment opportunity. If you remember our recent Red Plan bonds have been rated at just above junk bond status. There is a reason for that and I think I need to understand why that is.
Getting that wider view from our accountants has been a challenge. We don’t like to dwell on anything less than positive news in our schools these days. The ornery Art Johnston knows this. He’s been trying to tease out this information solo since Gary Glass left the school Board a little over two years ago. Here’s an example of the brick wall he’s encountered.
Like me Art has maintained that the Red Plan accounts (there’s that word again) for our large class sizes. That’s not a message our positive leaning School Board wants out there. So, Art tells me, he was trying to figure out about our bonding situation and he kept getting very little from our Budget and Finance man Bill Hanson who told him the bonds he was looking for did not exist. Then two years later Art was informed that the non-existent bonds he was looking for were called COPs. So, of course, Art’s mission to find bonds was technically impossible. Never mind that to all intents and purposes COPs are just another name for the same thing, a certificate of participation. I’ve learned a lesson from this.
I did meet with Bill Hanson after getting elected and before being seated at Mike Meirnicki’s suggestion. I brought with me a public notice that state law requires the District to post on our official newspaper, the DNT, each year.
NOTE: (I just spent an hour and half overcoming computer difficulties getting a picture of it here on this page)
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Mr. Hanson’s comment on looking at this was that he really didn’t like stuff like this which was all a little iffy until the end of the year final accounting. It turns out I can appreciate this just as I can appreciate another related dilemma. Depending on whose accounting you are looking at and how they lump different items into different categories, the accountants, the District, the Minnesota Dept of Education you can find different categories of supposedly concluded fiscal years with different totals that are puzzling if not outright alarming.
NOTE:I did not stop here as I was writing. I continued on analyzing the figures and some of the other documents provided me by Mr. Hanson and that I downloaded from the Minnesota Dept. of Education’s website. So much of the writing containing a great many questions may be easy to answer if by easy you mean taking an accounting class which I’ve recently been considering doing. I’ve spent perhaps twenty hours on Friday and Saturday pouring over the stacks of financial documents I have. I may have a full Sunday of doing the same. Or I may take a break and put together a quick dirty snow sculpture with the scads of snow in my front yard. It seems a shame that with all the snow available this year I’ve done so little sculpting but frankly its been too cold for me and building a snow sculpture now is what is really a victim of ennui. I’ve got to figure out the District’s finances before we settle a teacher’s contract that scares the bejesus out of me. We have another closed meeting on the contract tomorrow at 4. Sheesh!
I’ve just erased what I’d written to complete this post. I’ve got more finance study ahead of me today but I’m going to got out in the snow to clear my mind. But first I’m going to put back one of my chainsaws. Its one I have very little control over – the teacher’s pension.
As of today I have less hope for our teacher’s pensions than ever. Roger Reinert makes no mention of it in his long list of things it would be nice to do this year and he also says that he thinks its going to be a short session. That means that this year with a surplus and a way to pay for/hide/embed the local teachers DFTRA into the State’s TRA I don’t see it happening. There is suddenly a burst of activity to lower taxes by the DFL.
I think there will soon be an outcry by Duluth’s teachers to save their pension not unlike the Duluth City employees cries a couple years ago. What is The DFT doing about this? Nada. Oh, they are once again attempting to boost the high fives of senior teachers in the negotiations to boost up the obligations of a pension fund that can’t come close to paying them based on their current salaries. Just Brilliant.
I have one more observation. I think the state will sometime in the ten years face the prospect of clipping the benefits of TRA members statewide. Our teachers in Duluth and those in St. Paul should pray that their pension programs get folded into the TRA before they are left behind.
For my part I will gladly give the voters of Duluth the option of voting to fully fund the bloated pension benefits that DFTRA assured our teachers when the DFTRA runs short of funds. If the state legislature mandates that Duluth pay for them I’ll resign from the School Board.
Are you listening Roger and Tom Bakk?
I apologize for the sloppiness of this post. If I waited to edit it into respectability I’d never post it. Twenty hours of pouring through financial docs will do that to a guy.
