{"id":27085,"date":"2019-03-23T16:23:27","date_gmt":"2019-03-23T21:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=27085"},"modified":"2019-03-23T16:34:19","modified_gmt":"2019-03-23T21:34:19","slug":"i-owe-nora-sally-and-josh-an-apology-here-it-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=27085","title":{"rendered":"I owe Nora, Sally and Josh an apology &#8211; Here it is&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t have it in me to watch Duluth School Board meetings so I relied on the story in the Duluth News Tribune to pontificate about the recent decision to keep $777,000 from the General Fund out of payments to Red Plan building bonds and keep it in the classroom:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Here is the pertinent part that I wrote in the Fulcrum post:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.duluthnewstribune.com\/news\/education\/4587258-duluth-school-board-moves-forward-debt-refinancing\">This [DNT] story<\/a> explains how three school board members (who were playing Republicans) voted to turn their back on $700,000 annually for Duluth\u2019s public school classrooms (7 teachers worth) to show off their fiscal conservatism. They didn\u2019t want to raise taxes by a half million over the next fifteen years to put $700,000 a year into the classrooms.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Because this was a DNT story and because the DNT&#8217;s coverage of the School Board is threadbare I didn&#8217;t want to mention the three school board members name in my blog piece. I left it to readers to find them in the Trib story I linked to. I would have been better off reading Loren Martell&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/duluthreader.com\/articles\/2019\/03\/21\/16350_can_you_see_the_red_rainbow\">always longish reportage<\/a> of this school board meeting. Martell makes clear that the cost to taxpayers is not a half million dollars but four point three million dollars. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also learned a couple other tidbits. The Administrators and the Finance experts, <em>who are going to make a mint on the modest savings that their refinancing will produce<\/em>, made it very hard to tell what the financial consequences of their refinancing was. It was Nora Sandstad and Sally Trnka who doggedly pulled this information out of the Board&#8217;s guests. Good for them. It is so typical of Superintendent Gronseth to withold any information that might damage his reputation. Check out this story in the Zenith News. Gronseth&#8217;s opacity cost the District to f<a href=\"https:\/\/www.zenithcitynews.com\/single-post\/020519-feature?fbclid=IwAR2avtgJULx0RYqmYZ8ux4XA1hpVFGOBhEE29rMqxDA2lQsMhI-saxNHigU\">ork over $55,000 to Art Johnston<\/a> to avoid a much worse fate in a court of law.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps it was because of the Superintendent&#8217;s sneakiness that he lost three votes to preserve that $700,000 per year for our classrooms. As I made clear in the Fulcrum post I understand how the Red Plan drained the classroom budget. I&#8217;d have been hard pressed not to accept the financing to let it go through even at a $4 plus million pricetag. BUT, it would have been easy me for to vote against it knowing I would lose the vote. Voting against is was a way to slap the Superintendent&#8217;s hand. <\/p>\n<p>My post Red Plan mantra is: Punish the lunkheads who put the District behind the fiscal eight ball but not the children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t have it in me to watch Duluth School Board meetings so I relied on the story in the Duluth News Tribune to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27085"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"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=27085"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27093,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27085\/revisions\/27093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}