A SOBERING PREFACE:
We will have a Committee of the Whole meeting at 5 PM on Tuesday to consider our 2017-18 budget. I explained that an initial worksheet sent to use said we could face a $5 to $9 million deficit in 2019. In a flurry of email following this info, it now appears this did not include the $3.4 million annual transfers out of the General Fund into bond repayments. (I used a $3 million figure earlier which understated the actual transfer) If this is true we face either an $8.4 or $12.4 million deficit in 2019. That is “gobsmacking” as they would say at Hogwarts.
For eight year’s we have been trying to sell off buildings to help pay for the Red Plan. We have received offers on four buildings in recent years New Central, New Central’s STC (the Secondary Technical Center), Nettleton Elementary and most recently Rockridge Elementary. All are empty buildings that are expensive to heat and maintain. As a Board we have deemed it inadvisable to sell to “competitors” even though two such entities have placed the highest offers on all of these buildings. This post considers two of the properties – Rockridge and the STC.
709 has a long-standing relationship with a separate Independent system called Woodland Hills which takes in troubled kids from all over the Midwest in a “residential” setting. Long ago they bought our old Cobb Elementary along Woodland Avenue. We now lease this building from them while they use 709 teachers to teach their clientele. It’s an old building and costs Woodland Hills more each year to fix up. They will need to charge us more for lease payments but our District wants to avoid these additional expenses. We suggested that they could use the Rockridge School thinking that it would have a longer life and help us avoid an increase in lease payments. But there is a big hitch. We estimate it will cost us $2.5 million to take the elementary school and alter it to suit high school students. Maybe this will be a wash if we no longer pay to lease our own building, Rockridge, but we will also lose a new offer on the building which could go to paying off Red Plan debt. To my knowledge that offer has never been mentioned in the press and the Board has not granted me permission to mention it now.
I recall asking at a recent closed meeting if we had considered using the STC as an alternative facility for Woodland Hills students. I can’t remember what we were told but the discussion went nowhere. Well, bless her heart, Alanna Oswald asked the Director of Woodland Hills if he had ever discussed using the STC instead of Rockridge. No one from 709 had raised that possibility with him. He was game for it. Since we have an offer for Rockridge that could be a boon to 709 I think we ought to consider it. However, we have very little time to spruce up either Rockridge or the STC if Woodland Hills students are going to move in next Fall which is their timetable.
Why hasn’t this possibility been discussed with our school board or Woodland Hills? I suspect the answer may have to do with our allergic reaction to “competitors.”
Another Board member recently suggested to me that selling the STC by itself would be foolish because that’s what makes the whole Central site valuable. However, I pointed out we decided to sell the Central site in bits and pieces to make it more attractive to buyers. If we used the STC for Woodland Hills we could sell Rockridge at a profit, use the proceeds to fix up the STC, and satisfy Woodland Hills. We would still have the rest of the Central site to sell. That’s Alanna’s idea and I think it is brilliant whether “competitors” benefit from such sales or not.
I have spilled more beans than some of my colleagues would want me to spill. I don’t do this lightly. I was censured by a previous school board for reporting that we had buyers who were willing to pay us $10 million for the Central property before the District was ready to acknowledge it. (That sale fell through later when the buyers got cold feet) So, I’m treading on Elizabeth Warren territory here.
I’ll just remember Warren’s new mantra: “Never-the-less she persisted.”
I like the sound of that a lot better than a $12.4 million deficit in 2019.
