THE NEW SCHOOL SINKING FUND
Go back to the ELOST III Projects Summary that I received from the school system's administration. Do you see the new school listed on any line there? No? Funny, I don't see it there, either.
But if you check this newspaper article from 2005, you will find that the new school was the number one priority on the list, to the tune of $9.5 million (plus another $3 million from the state, which I believe means from those of us who pay state taxes.) This is what we taxpayers were told at the time. But the gym was a bit more expensive than we were told, and of course the revenue projection was pie-in-the-sky high, and the money had to come from somewhere. So, we built a gym. Very nice. The locals have a nickname for it: the Taj Mahal. Not very original, but quite descriptive. It really is a nice gym. And it is pretty close to the projected cost for the new school that wasn't built.
The further we have gone into the third ELOST, the more honest the school system has become. This is a link to a school system web page that summarizes ELOST III expenditures. I am posting the two most recent versions of the page here, as the web site page does change, and it is quite possible that it may disappear completely prior to the election. The left hand page was accurate as of the end of October, 2008, while the right hand page was posted recently, after the end of September, 2009. The first posting has the new school still listed, at $9,000,000, whereas the more recent posting doesn't list a price tag for the new school. Notice that even the more recent one does not jive with the projects summary sheet I received under the Open Records law. There is, for example, a $227,000 discrepancy when it comes to money spent on school buses.
All of this is, of course, perfectly legal. I am not a fan of dissembling in public discourse when it comes to deciding issues of taxation, but a lot of that goes on these days.