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Board to keep bond issue as proposed
Published 8/12/2008 in News : Education
By EMILY BEHLMANN
ebehlmann@gctelegram.com
The $97.5 million bond issue plan laid out last week for the USD 457 Board of Education will be the one put before voters in November, following unanimous approval by the board Monday night.
The board voted 6-0, with Gail Dunford absent, to submit the proposal for formal approval by the Kansas State Board of Education, and to place the issue on the ballot.
A motion from board member George Hopkins to expand the planned auditorium from 750 to 1,500 seats died without a second, and no board member moved to add a pool to the proposed high school, as had been discussed previously.
As advised by John Haas of Ranson Financial Consultants, the bonds would be paid over 25 years, which Haas estimated would require an 8.42-mill increase to the school district's bonded indebtedness. That would bring the school district's overall mill levy to 44.562 mills, after the board approved a .4-mill decrease Monday night as part of its annual budgeting process.
If passed, the bond issue would cost the owner of a $100,000 home an estimated $96.83 more a year, or $8.10 a month, for 25 years. With the increase on top of USD 457's current mill levy, that homeowner would pay a total of $512.46 toward the school district.
The bond issue would fund a long-range facility plan approved by the board in the spring after discussions of how to relieve district-wide overcrowding, provide each teacher with a classroom, improve vocational facilities and eliminate mobile classrooms, among other things.
The plan involves construction of a $92.5 million high school for 2,000 students that would replace the current Garden City High School, conversion of GCHS into a middle school, conversion of Abe Hubert Middle School into an elementary school, and expansions to Garfield Elementary School to make it a centralized early childhood center almost twice its current size.
Performing arts possibilities
The proposed new high school, a 384,000-square-foot building expected to be constructed north of Mary Street between Campus Drive and the bypass, offers an ideal opportunity to provide the community with the fine arts auditorium it has discussed for a long time, Hopkins said.
"I think it would be a shame for us to let this opportunity go by," he said. "This is an ideal situation to build a cost-effective auditorium."
Expanding a 750-seat auditorium already planned for a new high school would cost a lot less than if Finney County's taxing entities tried to build a free-standing fine arts center later, he said.
He moved to add $1,895,060 to the bond issue's total cost based on architects' estimate of the additional expense for taking a 750-seat proposed auditorium into a one-level, 1,500-seat facility.
Creating a two-level, 1,500-seat auditorium instead would add $2,886,680 to the original estimate, architects said. However, according to architect Stuart Nelson of the local firm Gibson, Mancini, Carmichael & Nelson, the acoustics and sight lines in a two-level facility would be better than trying to fit so many seats on one level. Nelson is working on the bond issue project with DLR Group of Overland Park.
Other board members argued against Hopkins' motion, commenting both on the costs of expanding and the academic value of the 750-seat auditorium in architects' original plan.
The primary purpose of constructing a new high school is for academics, board member Jeff Crist said, and additions like an auditorium to be shared with the community would be "ancillary."
"At what point in time does the school district put up the dollars and cents of a project that could support the community college, the city, the county?" board President Mike Utz asked.
Other taxing entities could be asked to help, Hopkins said, but ultimately, the money would be coming from the same people regardless -- local taxpayers.
GCHS Drama Director Jenny Regier said during the meeting that a larger auditorium wouldn't be ideal for academics.
She said she'd prefer a smaller auditorium because it would give her students more opportunities to take care of all the jobs in the theater, and it would help them fill the facility closer to capacity for performances. In addition, she'd have lower royalty fees for plays, as she has to pay based on the number of seats in the auditorium, not the number of seats that end up filled at performance nights, she said.
In her nine years of working at Clifford Hope Auditorium, community events have filled it to capacity twice, Regier said.
Board on pool: Too expensive
The estimated $7,319,820 cost of adding a pool to the proposed new high school put a stop to talks of including that feature in the bond issue, though architects said building plans could be devised to allow a pool to be installed later.
The pool suggestion originally had come from Dunford, who wasn't present Monday. She said she thought it would be a good way to provide students with an opportunity to improve health, and would give the GCHS swim team -- which now swims at the Garden City Family YMCA -- a home.
Board members said they liked the idea, but not the expense, and Utz added that more research on pool maintenance and chemical storage would be required before he would support moving forward with the addition.
"I'd love to see a pool added, but $7 million -- wow," board member Tom Blackburn said.
Other board business
In other business, the board unanimously approved a budget that would decrease the local tax rate by .4 mills for 2008-09, after a hearing that drew comments from one citizen.
Resident Harold Starr said he thought the amount USD 457 would be spending per student would be "pretty excessive" under its proposed budget for the year, and that "there needs to be some tightening somewhere."
The budget would set the school district's general fund -- an amount determined exclusively by the state's school finance formula and paid with both state and local sources -- at $49,352,146, up by about $2 million from last year because of changes in the formula, according to USD 457 Financial Officer Kathleen Whitley.
Its supplemental general fund -- determined by the board and levied from local taxes -- would be $8,177,931, up about $500,000 from last year. The increase in the fund with a lower tax rate is possible because of a boost in the school district's expected assessed valuation, Whitley said.
The approximate $57.5 million total means USD 457 would be spending about $7,900 for each of about 7,300 students -- an amount Whitley said is "probably pretty conservative."
The approved budget sets the 2008-09 levy at 36.142 mills, which would cost the owner of a $100,000 home $415.61 -- down from $420.21 last year.
"We've made an effort to get teachers' salaries up and reduce class sizes," board member Bruce Reichmuth said. "(The budget) is certainly going to go up even if enrollment is not going up."
Also approved unanimously by the board were the following:
n Goals reviewed at previous meetings for the 2008-09 school year. They cover areas of raising academic standards for students, effectively managing district resources, refining processes to improve communication, providing a structure that will maximize learning in a safe and orderly environment, and developing a comprehensive long-range facility plan.
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