School bond: Hays school board says it wants long-term facilities plan

By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

The Hays school board Monday night discussed the need to develop a long-range facilities plan after two school bonds failed in the last two years.

A $78.5 million bond issue failed in November, and a $94 million bond issue failed in 2016.

Superintendent John Thissen told the board community members have said the bond was too comprehensive, too long and the financial burden of the bond on individual taxpayers was too high.

Board member Paul Adams said he thought voters also needed to see more concrete plans.

Thissen showed the board photos of several completed projects that DLR, the district’s architectural firm on the last bond, had done in other districts.

“It is hard sometimes to get the visual and understand what the public is really voting on,” he said.

Thissen went over several possibilities for bonds with shorter time frames and lower tax amounts. A 15-year bond, which would increase taxes on a $150,000 home by $12 per month, would generate $29.5 million. If a quarter cent sales tax was added, the bond would raise $38.25 million.

Adams, who has toured the ongoing improvements in Dodge City, which is currently working on upgrades at its high school, said the offerings were allowing students to earn advanced training in arts and sciences and go directly into the workforce after high school.

“The investment they have made in the physical plant is changing the curriculum,” he said. “And they are having these kids ready, as you mentioned earlier with KESA, for the workforce. It is not necessarily to get them ready for college, but to get them ready for work.”

Board member Mandy Fox asked what the appropriate time would be to wait between bonds.

“We have really pushed on it for the last year, year and half,” Fox said. “Do you burn out your volunteers? Do you burn out the community? Do they notice any changes that we have made from one election to the next because they are so quick and close together? I don’t know what the right amount of time is.”

Thissen said he asked DLR and other districts this question and the answer was that it depends. If the district would decide to carve off projects from the first two bond attempts, it could move more quickly than if it started from scratch. The quickest another bond was recommended was September. Thissen said he did not recommend to go on the ballot in November during the state and federal mid-term elections. The next best time after November would be January 2019.

Thissen said he would not like to delay another attempt at a bond for another year or two.

He said the district needs to have a solution for what it is going to do with its oldest buildings, which are 90 years old. The district has serious problems with the plumbing, handicap accessibility and security at several of its oldest buildings.

“A couple of years is an answer. You have made a decision that we are going to replace systems in a couple of our buildings that are in the worst shape because we will have to,” he said. “If you delay it that length of time, you are making a decision. You have almost committed to putting $100,000, $200,000 or $300,000 into some older buildings. Then two years from now or three years from now, it may be hard to have any justification of having a plan of walking away from them.”

If the district would look at a 15-year bond, it would also need to look at what its needs would be 15 years from now, Thissen said. He said district needs to look at all money, including bond money, capital outlay funds and possible lease agreements.

Sophia Rose Young said a long-term plan was something the district needed to focus on to move forward.

“When I attended the Kansas Association of School Boards annual conference, I listened to other school districts talk about their success with school bonds,” Young said. “There was a school district that mentioned their community knows when their next bond was going to come and what it was going to be. They passed one for an elementary school, and they knew in seven more years they were going to come back and ask for that middle school because they had built that plan out and they were planning ahead.”

The board has not decided who will create a new plan. Thissen said the board received criticism during the first bond the board was too involved in the decision-making process. Community members complained too many people were involved in making decisions on the second bond.

“I think the problem in both of those was that the committee went out and did their thing and the board didn’t do a lot,” board member Greg Schwartz said.

Schwartz also said he thought the district needs a long-term facilities plan.

Board President Lance Bickle said he thinks the board needs to find a happy medium.

“I agree I don’t think we need to reinvent the wheel, but I think when you are talking about that kind of money, I see the other point as well. … You have a committee that worked all this time and that first Vision Team spent God knows how long on this,” Bickle said. “Who was I after hearing them for a couple of weeks for a grand total of couple hours to say, ‘I don’t like this plan. I think you should do this.’ That is where I personally struggled as a board member. Who was I to come in and question all that? I think we need to find that happy medium and more board ownership.”

He agreed the district needs a long-range plan.

“We have heard that loud and clear that people want a long-range plan,” Bickle said. “They want to see. To me, it comes down to something tangible. We can talk about it until we are blue in the face, but we need to have something out there that shows them this is the plan. We need to have this stuff documented. We need to show them.”

Boar member Luke Oborny said that plan will have to be highly adaptive.

“The only thing I don’t like about that is, realistically, you are paying forever,” he said.

Thissen said the newest building in the district is 40 years old and that the district needs a starting point.

Thissen said in the next two weeks he planned to have one-on-one or individual phone conversations with each board member to get an idea of where the district needs to start working.