That’s what Marcia Stromgren calls her Public Access TV show. You be the judge of the title’s accuracy.
At one hour in lenghth its a third as long as the typical School Board meeting.
Marci is extremely tax phobic. I’m simply a fiscal conservative. We have battled for years over social issues. When I was a Republican in good standing we debated abortion. She is as unyielding on this issue as I am forgiving. This was about thirty years ago.
Ten years ago we joined forces on the fight for a vote on the Red Plan. In recent years she has videoed school board meetings that the School District doesn’t bother with. Now she has learned how to put them on youtube along with her PAC shows.
Towards the end of her interview I offer the only solution I see to the School District’s implosion. More taxes. I think Marci was in shock when I said this. I laid out how I would attempt to do this if I had my druthers. First I wouldn’t do it until I was reelected to the Duluth School Board. I would run as a tax raiser and a big time tax raiser at that.
The school board should have raised closer to one hundred million more to finance the Red Plan especially after they boosted it up by an additional sixty million dollars. That was the only way they could have built it without cannibalizing classroom spending. They were too cowardly to do this upfront and or ignorant to realize how this would devastate our programming. Keith Dixon did. He left town in a big hurry after helping raise another twenty million of spending.
I tell Marci in this segment that I will use myself as the referendum that Duluth Voters never got. If they refuse to vote for me because I’ll be campaigning to raise taxes I will happily watch with them from the sidelines as ISD 709 sinks ever lower.
My justification for raising taxes will be simple. We invested a half billion dollars into the Red Plan facilities. Letting that huge investment crumble into ghettoized schools makes no sense. The current School Board majority may be willing to turn down $14.2 million to sell a wreck like the Central property but I’m not one to cut off my nose to spite my face. I want that half billion dollar investment to pay. Letting it rot because I won’t pay enough taxes to keep it afloat doesn’t pass muster.
In the long haul there is one hope to ease those taxes. Increase the Duluth population and fill up the schools. I don’t know when or if that will happen. If it does, we will get more per pupil aid from the state and could back off the local levies while we wait the next fifteen years for the Red Plan to be paid off. I’ll be eighty by the time that happens. If I make it that far and see the Duluth Schools survive the duplicity, self righteousness and ineptitude of the last decade I’ll be a very satisfied man.
