Simple Math

Despite his peppery stubbornness Art Johnston will be exonerated while the rest of the school board will suffer serious discredit. If not in the upcoming hearing then after a costly, prolonged court battle and/or in a November election.

The criticism of Art is based on a current fad for faux civility and denying Art his first amendment protection of Free Speech something the Editors of the Duluth News Tribune ought to be skittish about themselves. There is a charge of assault that has been dumbed down to – he shouldn’t have touched the arms of the Superintendent and the Chairman of the Board and pointed his fingers at them. His yelling was largely unheard by anyone not directly in front of him and the two episodes together barely lasted three minutes on the day an administrator, an Administration favorite who had it out for Art, plunged a knife into Art’s partner of fourteen years.

Furthermore Art’s long list of angry words were themselves provoked by a willful majority of the School Board who prevented Art (and me) from asking questions about the District’s finances. What we asked for should have been public data available to anyone requesting it. What kind of unreasonable questions were we asking? Oh, things like: “who was paid $84 million in mysterious “soft costs” for the construction of the Red Plan?” The unwillingness of the Board majority to let these answers be aired or answered explain’s Art’s 1st Amendment protected peppery comments at School Board meetings.

Art had been reelected by his voters to ask those questions. They are rightly fearful that in the new Red Plan School District their children are being dealt an inferior hand.

I recommend the previous two posts in which I try to simplify the muddled financial explanations by our current Administration to help explain why all our children (not just those out west) have seen continuing declines in our educational program. Over the course of what promises to be a year long slog through the courts I will offer documents backing up this addition to those posts.

For now you will simply have to take my word for the following:

From the beginning the school District’s Red Plan financing never made sense to me. Fortunately I am a pack rat and after being elected I went through some of the debris in my attic left over from my previous term on the School Board. One such document was from 1997. It laid out the year’s budget showing that our levy of local property tax payers was about $22.5 million dollars (I may be a million off on this but its a good enough figure for now)

Of that we were paying off $2.5 million each year to bond holders for previous building projects. How much did that leave us to spend on operations?

$22,500,000.00
-$2,500,000.00
$20,000,000.00

I can’t guarantee that we actually were putting $20 million into what we would call classroom expenses. Still that was money not flowing to bankers.

So, How much do we have today to spend from our property taxes on something other than Building bond debt repayment?

That was answered on Monday this week when we looked at our preliminary 2014 audit.

On page 34 we find that our levy has increased radically from 1997’s $22,500,000.00. This school year we are levying $32,853,480.86 for our 2015 payments. I will round this up to $33 million.

Now let me do another oversimplified calculation before I continue.

We now know that the Red Plan will cost roughly $480,000,000.00 over approximately twenty years of repayments. How much is this annualized debt repayment? More math.

$480,000,000.00/20 years = $24 million per year

Now we get to the coup de grace. How much can we currently spend on operations after subtracting $24 million each year from our local property tax levy? Here goes:

$33,000,000.00 (the 2014 levy)
-24,000,000.00 (the annualized cost of debt repayment on the Red Plan)
$ 9,000,000.00 (local levy available for costs other than debt repayment)

Now let’s compare how much of our current local property taxes we have to spend on operations vs. the funds available back in 1997:

1997 non debt service = $20,000,000.00 VS 2014 non debt service = $ 9,000,000.00

We had about eleven million more of our local property taxes to spend on classrooms seventeen years ago. What the School Boards of the past seven years did, perhaps unwittingly, was to take half of the local levy that had been used for operations and cut it to use to pay off Red Plan costs and prevent taxpayers from rioting in the streets. Was such draconian cutting of the school program worth it?

I wrote in the previous post: “We were told last night that the average teacher currently costs us $90,000/year.”

$11,000,000.00 would buy us a lot of teachers; more than enough to ensure we had no secondary classes with 40 kids in them and probably enough to buy back the lost music programs that blew away with the seventh hour among other lost opportunities for our children.

I think a much better explanation for the attempt to remove Art Johnston is the Board majority’s desire to suppress information damaging to the school boards of the past. It almost invites the question of what there is to hide. This will be a costly, heavy-handed distraction from the work of the school board all to embarrass and muzzle a member who refuses to stop asking embarrassing questions. It would have been so much easier just to keep refusing to let him get answers to his questions.

Remember the sales pitch to Duluth was that the Red Plan would offer lots of savings. Even if there are some savings its still costing us $24 million a year or thereabouts.

An honest sales pitch would have warned us that we needed to dig much deeper to pay for the Red Plan. If we wanted to have all our new schools made over in a six year stretch without drastic cuts to our classrooms we should have planned on paying $24 million more a year making our annual taxes $46.5 million and not today’s $33,000,000.00 million. The math on that is simple too. Just add $24 million to 1997’s 22.5 million.

Could we get voters to pass another ten million a year to cover the Red Plan’s shortfall? Not if the School Board’s only response to Art Johnston’s asking unwanted questions is to deprive him of his first amendment protected right to ask unpleasant questions.

Recently the Duluth News Tribune editorial board, which resisted asking too many questions about the Red Plan during its heyday, wrote a scathing editorial about our now decrepit public library decrying its shabby construction. Its only a mere 35 years old. Let’s hope that the Red Plan will not provide Duluth a similar unhappy surprise 35 years hence. Like our School Board the Editorial Board seem a little over eager to have Art Johnston’s First Amendment Rights ridden roughshod and to get him and his pesky questions off their front pages.

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