{"id":1277,"date":"2008-06-03T11:48:02","date_gmt":"2008-06-03T16:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?page_id=1277"},"modified":"2016-03-14T06:11:26","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T11:11:26","slug":"let-duluth-vote","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?page_id=1277","title":{"rendered":"Let Duluth Vote"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Red Plan took over my life when the school board that took over upon my retirement decided to impose a $257 million building project on the people of Duluth without holding a referendum. I fought for a referendum doggedly for four years, took the District and Johnson Controls <\/a> to court then retired exhausted from the fight. Today I am back on the school board whose supporters attempted to remove an ally of mine and censured the both of us for good measure after wasting $200,000 more tax payer dollars to remove him (unsuccessfully) in retribution for their failure to overturn his election by fiat. BTW the Red Plan always had a much higher price tag. You have to include interest. By they time the old board added another $60 million in purchases the cost to taxpayers was almost half a billion dollars on a community of 90,000 people. That was just the taxes.<\/p>\n

The real cost was to the classroom. When I was first elected to the Duluth School Board in 1995 we poured about $20 million of a $22 million local property tax levy into our general fund (available for classrooms). Today (2016) We levy about $32 million. The Red Plan building bond repayments are about $24 million a year. Subtract $24 million from $32 million and that leaves about $8 million for the General Fund. We “saved” money by laying off teachers and cramming more kids in the remaining teacher’s classrooms. <\/p>\n

When I was still fighting this travesty instead of repairing the damage (after getting reelected to the School Board in 2013) I published this chaotic web page detailing the misdeeds of the school board: www.letduluthvote.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Red Plan took over my life when the school board that took over upon my retirement decided to impose a $257 million building…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1277"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1277"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15546,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1277\/revisions\/15546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}