Holding the line on new schools
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ou expect school officials to be wearing their thinking hats all the time -- they are, after all, in the education business.
And that habit of thinking things through, we hope, is alive and well at the Ogden School District. That's because officials there are up against the same problem that's been affecting fast-growing Weber and Davis districts: skyrocketing construction costs for new schools.
Ogden, you'll recall, has been tasked by the city's voters to rehabilitate and/or rebuild most of its schools over the next several years. The district was authorized to bond for $95.3 million to do the work, but already it's looking like the first project, a magnet elementary school off Second Street, will probably cost $11 million instead of the budgeted $9 million.
District officials remain undeterred, however, and say they'll find the money to do everything they said they'd do. But as Standard-Examiner reporter Amy K. Stewart reported, they just aren't yet sure how much finagling of funds is ahead; that's because most of the projects are just now going out to bid.
"The district promised the public we would do these projects," Gary Reed, the district's director of support services, told Stewart. "We're not going to back down." Furthermore, he said, the district would "find the money without asking the public to pay for it."
It's a bold promise, but precisely the kind we like to hear public servants make. The Ogden School District's road to approval of this bond was bruising, and officials realize more than others, we think, that they are dealing with taxpayer funds -- not free money falling from the sky. We hope all Ogden taxpayers and voters appreciate this commitment to holding the budget line.
And it looks as if Reed and his colleagues have pretty good options for capturing more money. For example, there could be $4 million in interest earning on the first $60 million in bonds issued by the time construction projects begin. (There's already more than $1.2 million in that account.)
There also are no-interest loans through the State Office of Education -- limited in the sum that may be borrowed, but it could be a component of the total needed. And time periods for construction might be lengthened, say, from 12 months to 14 months.
But probably the next-best option would be to sell off property of soon-to-be-closed schools. In a perfect world, it would be nice to bank that land for whatever the future might hold. But the district is in a tight spot, and those old buildings and the land around them could be the salvation of that effort to deliver new and updated schools even during this period of inflationary construction costs.
Sometimes the threat of failure focuses the minds of those responsible for success.
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