Enter Bixby

I was quite taken with the op ed piece by Joshua Bixby in today’s paper. He’s one of the candidates running for the two At-large School Board vacancies.

I was not alone in appreciating Joshua’s thoughts. I just opened up an email from one of my old Let Duluth Vote comrades in arms.

She asked rhetorically: Does he ever sum up perfectly what happened to the good people of Duluth?”

My old ally adds that she recalls Let Duluth Vote trying on several fronts to turn back the damage by demanding a vote, developing a more moderate plan and trying to save neighborhood schools.

She goes on to recall that she went all over town and updated the LDV signs that first listed a $293 million price tag with one that said, if memory serves, $437 million. Of course, that was before new swimming pools and dozens of other goodies were added to the debt. We’re pretty close to a half billion in spending now. Liam worked that out and correctly calculated that paying it off in 20 years requires $25 million a year. When the Red Plan was first pitched the annual tax requirements were touted as being around $15 million a year. (although I don’t recall that the District was very eager to use that figure. They claimed that we would be saving $5 million a year in “staff cuts” and energy savings) Today the Red Plan is costing us an additional $10 million a year than first advertised savings or not.

Here’s Mr. Bixby’s column.

and here’s a sample I particularly appreciated:

There are some who like to refer to the Red Plan as the Long-Range Facilities Plan. The problem is the Red Plan wasn’t a long-range plan but a short-range plan, and it lacked a true long-range plan to guide the decisions that were made for it. Spending lots of money, hundreds of millions, doesn’t make a plan strategic or long-range; it simply makes it very expensive. The plan tried to address a decade, or decades, of deferred maintenance and changing demographics in five years, a short period of time. The disposition of our old schools got caught up in the artificially short time frame of the Red Plan. Selling or repurposing facilities is a slow, involved process, and it was overly optimistic to think the district’s urgency to offload the buildings would create any sense of urgency with neighbors, potential buyers or city planners.

Mr. Bixby has another paragraph that is a little harder to follow but it conclusion is right on target. The District is using its operating expenses to pay for the continued cost of paying off the Red Plan bonds. I could live with any candidate who understands this vital piece of the pie.

About the author