Reject the North Palos 117 Referendum!

Imagine that you needed more space in your home for your
growing family. The home in which you live was built in 1965, with additions in
1974, 1979 and 2000, but is a bit dated. While it would be nice to have a new
home, the economic issues in the family are pretty bad. Family members are
having trouble making car and credit card payments. There have actually been
some repossessions of purchases.

You come down to two choices; knock down your current home
and build another one, or add on just to meet your needs. The addition would
cost about $100,000, but knocking down the house and building a new one would
cost FOUR TIMES as much!

If it’s your money, the choice is pretty clear. You build
the addition and perhaps renovate the house when the family can afford it.

This situation is pretty much analogous to the situation at
Conrady Junior High school in North Palos 117, where the Board is pushing a
referendum to raise taxes of about $30 million to knock down Conrady and build
a completely new school of a little bigger size.

There is one big difference from the “family” analogy above,
however. The Board is making their decision by spending OTHER PEOPLE’S money!

“Red Flags” in Referendum Campaigning

Over the years I’ve participated in quite a few school
building projects, both in our local districts and those of friends in other
communities. I’ve found there are certain “red flags” that pop up when a
district is trying to do something that it can’t justify by facts. I see quite
a few of these “red flags” coming up in the North Palos 117 Boards promotion of
this tax increase.

Why Doesn’t the
Board Tell Voters the Capacity of Conrady?

The first thing one does when determining facility space needs is to establish the capacity of the existing school. When I submitted a FOIA for this information, no such calculation for Conrady could be provided. Curious! From floor plans I was able to obtain under FOIA, it seems that there are about 42 “teaching stations” at Conrady. Typically a “full” classroom would house about 30 students, but occupancy of about 85% of “full” is typically used in capacity calculations. This means that the capacity of Conrady should be about 1070, but could be somewhat less because of low class sizes for special education. According to school report cards, current enrollment at Conrady is about 969, so it’s close to capacity and at least some addition may make sense, if enrollment will be increasing over the long term.

Why doesn't the Distirct Public Future Enrollment Projections?

The problem here is that for some reason the district has refused to publish its enrollment projections, only giving the enrollment up to 2012. The district has this information. It’s required to be established as part of any borrowing and bond purchase package as the district has recently issued, and to give false enrollment data there would be criminal fraud.

One wonders why the Board doesn’t post this enrollment projection on its web site. Perhaps the school report cards give a clue. Over the last two years the average daily attendance has dropped from 3073 to 3005. Is dropping enrollment a trend? If it is, one can understand why the Board wouldn’t want voters to know this before asking them for $30 million to serve INCREASING enrollment!

Highly Questionable Board Cost Data

I also reviewed the Board’s cost data for the various options, and, as a professional engineer who served for years as senior project manager for the largest school district in the state, the kindest thing I can say about the Board’s analysis is that it is “questionable”.

Unfortunately, when the Board was having a “citizen’s committee”to justify this boondoggle, they didn’t recruit any professional architects or engineer to ask critical questions.

One of the things highly unusual about the way the Board tried to justify this costly project was to use “equalized investment” as a metric rather than present or future worth analysis. The Board’s analysis ignored the fact that spending $40 million today is more costly than spending it ten years from now in future renovation costs. Ignoring the compounding time value of money cost is something I’ve never seen done before in school investment analysis. Looking at the Board’s claim that “investment” would be equalized by building a new school instead of additions in about ten years, adding time value of money into the analysis would have pushed “payback” out far further, out where any reasonable analysis couldn’t support building thenew school.

Board Fudging Project “Contingency”Costs

The Board also fudged “contingency” costs for the two projects. “Contingency” is the cost that is put into budgets to account for uncertainty in design, bidding, and construction.

Typically at this early stage of a new building project, a 15% cost contingency factor is considered appropriate because of uncertainty as to how much will be added by the “citizens committee”, mostly made up from those campaigning for the tax increase and whose desire is to spend as much of others people money as possible on the new school, should the tax increase be approved.

The Board only used 5% for the new school contingency, a number usually used once the design is complete and going out to bid.

They used 10% contingency, however, for the addition option, despite having FAR more detailed information on that scope of work.

Of course, if they used the same contingency for both projects, the new building never pays.

Where Were the Referendum “Town Halls”?

Another thing very curious about how the Board has been dealing with this has been the lack of town hall meetings with the Architects to answer tough questions about the project.

If they had nothing to hide, there would have been such meetings in the weeks prior to the referendum, but I guess the Board decided that making the Architects answer honest concerns about the project were not in the interest of passing the tax increase.

Pretty troubling.

Can the North Palos 117 Board Be Trusted Regarding Tax Increases?

There is also a question about how much the community can trust the Board regarding the students “need” for tax increases.

In 2005, the Board sold the community a “bill of goods” for a 75 cent tax increase “for the children”. They assured the community that every cent of that was “needed” and they couldn’t maintain programs with a penny less. So what happened?  It turns out the Board didn’t need any where need that much of a tax increase. School report cards show that in the years following the tax increase the district levied taxes more than $11 million MORE than expenses, and surpluses continue annually.

In fact, the Board is planning to use about $10 million from this overtaxation to pay for the new school!

Last December the district AGAIN voted 4-3 to increase the tax burden on the district taxpayers despite these excess reserves, among the highest in the Southland. So much for Board concern about the suffering taxpayers in 117, who are still having hundreds of foreclosures per year, at least partially due to unnecessarily high real estate taxes.

Clear Choice for Voters; REJECT THE REFERENDUM!

It seems those voters concerned about the welfare of the students in the district have a clear choice here. If the referendum is defeated, the tax rates won’t increase and the surplus the district overtaxed from the last referendum can be used to build sufficient new space and perform renovations to give the students the facilities they deserve. Problems with “life safety” conditions may be addressed by selling life safety bonds for funds the district may need, which in Illinois are allowed to be sold and added to the tax bills without referendum. The only “losers” under this plan would be those whose primary aim is to spend as much of other people’s money as possible on their boondoggles.

Here’s a little secret. It sure looks like the Board is planning to raise taxes this way EVEN IF THE REFERENDUM PASSES!

As far as I have been able to determine, no district in Illinois has ever demolished a structurally sound, relatively new school like Conrady to build a new one a little bigger. Oak Lawn HS district 229 rejected  such a foolish idea a few years ago.

Our communities don’t need this kind of “distinction” forfoolishness.

REJECT THE REFERENDUM IN NORTH PALOS 117 AND DO WHAT”S RIGHT
FOR THE STUDENTS AND TAXPAYERS ON APRIL 9th!

Bob Shelstrom is a Liberty Leader with the Illinois Policy Institute, a Professional Engineer with extensive experience in school renovation projects, and a former college and high school math and science teacher.