The target of the Westholm/Wasson column is Art Johnston:
What is new is the idea that running fewer schools and using the savings generated to repay bonds is a direct cause of ISD 709’s annual general-fund deficit, as claimed by School Board member Art Johnston in his Nov. 16 column in the News Tribune, “The Red Plan: Where did the money come from?”
His assertion would be accurate if there were no savings and money was being taken arbitrarily from the general fund to make bond payments. However, that’s not the case. Running fewer schools has resulted in about $5.3 million in annual non-teacher savings that are then applied to the bonds.
The first paragraph is intentionally wrong. It claims that Art has said running fewer schools has cost more money. Clearly Art has said that the Red Plan (as it has been implemented) is costing more money.
The simple fact is that the bond holders who lent money to ISD 709 are first in line to be repaid. We have to pay them twenty million a year back for twenty years first. We run our schools with whatever is left of the general fund after our debts are paid off. Twenty million was my calculation for annual repayments back when the Red plan was going to cost 257 million. It’s since grown by 56 million so we are having to pay back more than twenty million a year.
As the W’s noted we raised taxes, are selling buildings and used staff cuts (savings) to pay for the Red Plan. Recently our School Board all but decided to levy to the maximum to salve our swollen classrooms. I would have voted to do the same thing although not happily. The building sales were grossly over inflated. There was no way the District would raise over twenty million for old schools. Finally, I do not believe the District when it tells us that laying off staff has nothing to do with the bond holders who have first dibs on operational monies. If we were not paying off the bond holders for the Red Plan borrowing there would be no need to cut teachers.
It is obvious that the original assumptions of savings were grossly in error and that subsequent changes to the Red Plan have shot them all to hell. And about those changes. They are notoriously expensive. Any changes to original construction contracts once building has begun are called “change orders” and whatever spending constraints were built into the first contract are lost as changes are made to the plans. I’d love to know how many change orders have been implemented as the Red Plan ballooned from 257 million to 315 million dollars.
I understand the attack on Art Johnston by his eight detractors on the School Board. They are not however mad at him because he is wrong. They are mad at him because he is annoying. His complaints sabotage their efforts to put voters in a good frame of mind to pass future excess levy referendums. They highlight the bait and switch elements of the Red Plan and its impossible, too good to be true, selling points. I have no love for Art myself. I was so mad at him when he won election that I wrote to him in an email that I was glad he won because, since he was in the minority, he would get the same sort of carping and criticism that he aimed at me in the small Let Duluth Vote circle we both inhabited.
Art and I were allies at one time but his partner happened to work at East High and as near as I can tell reported every angry thing ever said about me by the teaching staff there to protect him from having his association with me drag him down to my level. That is, my assumption. Art’s a rough cob. He’s not wrong. At least not about our having to pay the bankers back with operational money.
