School prices are soaring
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em>"Don't blame me. Blame him."
-- Gil Grissom, "C.S.I."
(TV series)
The Ogden School Board's in the soup, and the temperature's rising.
A year ago, Ogden voters approved a $95.3 million bond to replace and/or refurbish most of its schools over the next few years, in the first phase of a larger plan to address all capital building needs in the district over the coming years. Unfortunately, what board members, district officials and their private contractors anticipated they could accomplish with $95 million in 2006 has fallen victim to an extreme dose of inflation. Now, in a little more than a year's time, costs have escalated an additional $40 million to accomplish the same tasks.
Catapulting construction costs are distressing everyone right now -- in both the public and private sectors. But when it comes to school districts, some have been caught a little more flat-footed than others.
As reported by the Standard-Examiner's Amy K. Stewart on Tuesday, the Davis County School District anticipates cutting back on some of the items it had expected to be covered by its $230 million bond -- also passed in June 2006. The difference, though, is Davis expects to be short $17 million on that $230 million total, or a 7.4 percent cost overrun.
The situation is even rosier at the Weber School District, where voters approved a $65 million bond last year. Weber planners expected a jump in costs and plan to complete all projects with current funding.
Ogden wasn't as fortunate. It now must deal with an astounding 42 percent jump in costs -- almost half again as much as it had reckoned 18 months ago. This is devastating news and, unfortunately, the finger-pointing and whining are well under way.
In an e-mail Q&A with reporter Stewart published exclusively on StandardNET (www.standard.net/live/news/104659/), Ogden School Board President Don Belnap defends district staff and private contractors, writing, "No one could have imagined that the present 1.5 percent per month construction inflation rate would be the rate."
Tell that to the Davis and Weber districts.
Then, worse, he attempts to rewrite history: "Let me remind the newspaper that your editorial board came out the Sunday before the February of 2004 bond election and said not to vote for the bond but to reduce the amount of the 156 million dollar bond to a more manageable amount. This school board did just that."
Well, what we actually advocated was somewhat more comprehensive -- and urgent. (Read the Feb. 1, 2004, editorial on our Web site at www.standard.net/live/opinion/editorials/104794/.) In this very space, we urged defeat of the $156 million bond in order to force "the school board and district to bring back a more reasonable and business-like plan for reconstruction of the aging infrastructure in November" 2004. The editorial noted some of the deficiencies in the board's proposal, including that it "hasn't yet decided whether or not to replace the 14 elementary schools with 14 more, or reduce the number to 11 elementary schools with each housing more students." We noted that part of the indecision regarding the elementary schools was due to the fact that the board hadn't yet decided "whether or not to modify class configuration. The district may go from its present K-5, 6-8, 9-12 model to K-6, 7-9, 10-12."
Furthermore, we asked, "While some schools certainly ought to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, why must all the schools be replaced? Why are there good schools decades older than Ogden's all across this nation still in operation and in good shape? Is the reward for completely letting a school rot through neglectful maintenance a brand-new building? Voters should reject waste."
Belnap conveniently forgets that the board's 2004 bond proposal was absent the aforementioned details voters would reasonably require to know how their tax increase would be spent. That's why the bond failed in 2004; the board assembled an unsatisfactory plan.
Subsequently, the board did not quickly regroup and put together a solid plan for the November 2004 ballot. We certainly don't fault it for performing its due diligence. But given the shortcomings of its 2004 bond proposal, its current president cannot honestly attempt to dodge responsibility for unanticipated cost overruns by denouncing this newspaper's editorial opinion. We didn't underwhelm voters in 2004 -- but the Ogden School Board did; this newspaper's opinion page did its job by spotlighting the plan's defects.
Now the task will be quality of leadership as the Ogden School Board decides how best to spend the $95.3 million authorized by voters. While doing so, we urge board members to resist playing the blame game.
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