A columnist for the Budgeteer dragged my body over the coals. I wrote him an email:
Mr. Langr,
You posit that stopping the Red Plan would cost the Duluth School district hundreds of millions in wasted money through inefficiency. The numbers the red plan partisans have been throwing around is something like this: spend $20 million a year and we can save $5 million a year. That’s not a very good spending to saving ratio.
You obviously don’t know much about the politics of excess levies. I’ve had a hand in trying to get the last four passed in Duluth. The notion that people will vote against them because they are mad at permitting the inefficiencies to continue is just silly. The notion that they will vote against them because their taxes went up too high is not. You will be sacrificing money for the classroom to have nice shiny new buildings with crumby, gutted programming. Dr. Dixon will be gone when that happens but my grandchild will suffer from Dixon’s legacy. When the 2001 excess levy failed we lost a lot of music programs, the seven hour secondary day, and crowded more kids into classes. Two Harbors, which built a shiny new High School hasn’t been able to pass excess levies and they just laid off 25 teachers. If we lose our $5 million a year how many teachers will the much larger Duluth lose? I used to calculate that teachers cost about $54,000. Of course, we won’t be losing the highest paid teachers but the new teachers on the bottom of the payscale. Divide a $30,000 salary into $5 million and you can begin to see how big a hit the young teachers could take. I calculate 166 teachers. Do you still feel like being cavalier about my worry?
You have put tremendous faith in all that Johnson Controls has spun about the red plan. What ever happened to good old fashioned skepticism?
Here’s a portion of what I told the State Department of Education last week and I’d match my figures against yours any day.
“According to the information coming out of JCI and the Duluth School District the average Duluth household will only pay between $9 and $11 per month in property taxes if the Red Plan is adopted for a maximum of $132 annually. Let’s test this.
If you multiply $11 dollars, by 12 months and then multiply that by 20 years you get $2,240 per household. If you assume that there are 2.5 people per household this would result in $896 in taxes for the average resident of the Duluth school district over the course the Red Plan.
But if you multiply this average individual tax burden by the 94,000 residents of the Duluth School District the resultant taxes over twenty years would yield only $84,224,000 a far cry from the $437 million it will take to finance the Red Plan..
If you simply divide the $437,000,000 figure by the District’s 94,000 residents you come up with a considerably higher per person tax over twenty years – $4,649. As some wag once said, “figures never lie, liar’s figure.”
JCI has had a long history of working with school districts on issues relating to air quality and construction. It advertises itself to school districts as an expert in helping pass bond referenda. It must be very annoying for JCI to put in lots of work with a District only to see a referendum voted down. In fact, half of the Minnesota school referendums failed in 2005. It must have been tempting for JCI to search for a way around this unprofitable work and since JCI’s attorneys have so much experience with school finance law its not all that surprising that they would discover a way to avoid referenda all together….” You can read the rest here.
And its that last point which a lot of you don’t get. Your vote is being stolen. I’m an old Civics teacher and I believe our votes are precious and should be defended. It will take a lot more than your snarkiness to derail my train.
Sincerely, Harry Welty
