Merc says No to SJUSD Measure A, says it's "manipulative"
San Jose Unified School District building.
SJUSD's call to renew its $72 parcel tax for another eight is seen as a last-minute attempt to squeeze taxpayers for money the district shouldn’t need. Merc's sharply argued op-ed excerpted, below.
Just six months after voters approved the San Jose Unified School District’s pricey property tax increase for school construction, officials are seeking renewal of a second levy for district operations.
District trustees have called a costly special election for May 6 and are warning that critical funding will expire if voters don’t approve Measure A. The last-minute rush is yet another sign of the district’s dysfunction, which was the subject of a scathing grand jury report last year.
For starters, the district does not, or should not, need the money. Over the past five fiscal years, from 2019-20 to 2023-24, student enrollment declined 13%, according to the district’s data.
Yet, no schools were closed during that time. The number of district employees actually went up slightly, by 0.4%. And expenditures increased from $366 million to $492 million, up 34% over five years.
Indeed, given the decline in enrollment, district officials should be looking at ways to trim costs rather than continuing the rapid escalation of expenditures.
Then there is the dodgy political timing of Measure A. District officials certainly knew since 2016, when voters passed Measure Y, that it would expire on June 30 of this year. They have had plenty of time to prepare and seek voter approval of an extension.
But district officials made a deliberate decision to wait until the last minute before calling an off-year election that is almost certain to have low voter turnout. They first wanted to push through the more costly $1.15 billion school construction bond program that they placed on the November 2024 ballot.
Paying off those bonds will require 30 years of tax increases and cost property owners at the start $59 per $100,000 of assessed value annually. Combined with two prior voter-approved bond measures, the total yearly tax bill for school bonds would peak in 2029 at $120 per $100,000 of assessed value.
For a house with a district average assessed value of $723,870, that would total $869 annually. For homes recently purchased at a county average of about $2 million, the tax bill for the bonds is about $2,400 a year.
So, despite having years to prepare for the parcel tax renewal election, they made the costly decision to postpone it until May 6. Because the election has just one item on it, the district must bear all the expenses for conducting the election, which will be about $2 million-$3 million. In other words, about half of the first year’s revenues from the extension would go toward offsetting the cost of the election.
That should tell you something about school trustees’ fiscal irresponsibility. Had they placed the parcel tax extension on the November ballot, the extra cost to the district would have been a quarter as much, or less, because expenses for balloting and vote counting would have been split with other government agencies holding elections.
None of this should be surprising considering the grand jury report chastising the district’s management policies and poor board meeting accessibility. This is a district plagued by a lack of transparency.
Read the whole thing here.
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