A Taxpayer's Guide to Surviving CUSD 200: Part III

In truth, I wasn’t planning on doing another blog for a few more days, but something came up that cannot be ignored.

If you’ve read my past two blogs on this topic you’ll know that

1)      CUSD 200 did not give a straight answer on why the price for the Jefferson project rose.

2)      CUSD 200 did not give a truthful answer as to how much it would cost taxpayers to do it.

Now for the third blog I had planned a third point, but it seems we are drawn like magnets back to that second point again.

It comes down to this: last night Joann Coghill revealed in public commentary at the Wheaton Chamber of Commerce that she herself does not understand the total cost taxpayers will bear if the Jefferson Referendum is passed.

For sake of argument I will assume in this blog that Joann Coghill is not intentionally lying. I prefer to believe she's simply confused.

Regardless, Coghill is not ready for the job of Board Member for CUSD 200.

While you’re at it, dear voters, feel free to boot all the incumbents out. Like Joann, they all seem quite satisfied to believe (and repeat) untrue things that they hear from CUSD 200 Administrators. If one purpose of the board is to keep CUSD 200 administrators in line, then it’s time to bring in a new guard. Because right now, we don't have one.

But I get ahead of myself here. A bit of background. Apologies to those who know this bit already.

Late last year Dr. Harris, in public statements to the media, failed to disclose that the last yearly Jefferson payment is, as they say, a doozy. By disclosing only the tiny (by way of comparison) annual costs for the first ten years, he understated the cost of the project by some $7.5 million. Nearly half of the total cost of the Jefferson project. See Exhibit A, which I borrowed from my last blog to graphically represent how the taxpayer cost was sold to us verses the true expenses we’d face.

Moving on. In February of this year, Joann Coghill rolled out the same false assurances.

As I noted in my blog a week ago, this is rather disturbing, because between those two dates falls January 28^th, which is the date when Kyle Nenninger brought forth his concerns about how District officials and board members were vastly understating the true cost of the project.

After Nenninger (rightly!) raised this stink, Dr. Harris agreed to put more information on the CUSD 200 website, clearly laying out the cost to taxpayers on that infamous 11^th year. That he did. I’ve include the chart from the CUSD 200 website here as Exhibit B just for reference.

So it’s all set straight, right?

Wrong.

Watch the video in this link here. Skip to the 26 minute and 30 seconds mark.

Listen to Joann Coghill restate her claim, and even amplify it. In the past, Coghill failed to give reference to the huge 11^th year payment. That was bad enough. Really bad. Here she states that the 11^th year payment will be just like the earlier payments. For those who’d rather just read her words here, they are as follows:

"The taxes that would be raised depending on the price of your home is anywhere from $20 to $50 a year for ten years. Then that eleventh year our other debt drops off and so we would still just have to pay that $20 to $50 for that eleventh year and that building would be paid off."

Yes, life would be great if we could incur a large debt, make a few interest payments, and walk away debt free. It doesn’t work like that, but Joann clearly does not understand this.

Someone this unable to work with large numbers or the concept of debt payments and the like should not be one of the watchdogs we as a community post to give oversight to the sometimes dubious actions and statements of the CUSD 200 administrators.

But Joann didn’t stop there. In a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction finale, her next words were these:

“Wouldn't you love to pay off your mortgage in eleven years?”

Wouldn’t we all.

In their eagerness to get us taxpayers to sign on for this new debt, CUSD 200  has found it easy to forget the large last payment.

But you can be sure that the bondholders will not.