Tam Union district to seek lower cost Measure A bond option

Tamalpais Union High School District trustees asked staff this week to investigate which Measure A bond projects costs could be trimmed.

The measure, which had been set at $517 million, failed to get the required 55% of voter approval in March. Trustees said they wanted to see if engineers could come up with a lower total cost option through postponing or reworking nonessential items that they could present to voters in an upcoming poll.

The new polling, if authorized, would be in advance of a potential decision to retry the measure and place it on the Nov. 5 ballot. The deadline to place a measure on the ballot is Aug. 9.

“We want to see if you could look at ways of maybe putting off some things, but not touching our dire needs, such as ADA upgrades and replacing roofs,” board president Leslie Harlander told staff at the board meeting on Tuesday.

The federal Americans with Disabilities Act mandates access to public buildings for the disabled. Such access is currently lacking on some campuses, Harlander added.

“I’m sure that some voters have no idea that at Tam High, people can’t get to the second floor if they are disabled,” Harlander added.

Board members also asked staff to work with Godbe Research Inc., the district’s polling consultant, to reframe some of the boilerplate polling questions to be more specific to the needs of the district.

“We need to be more targeted,” trustee Cynthia Roenisch said. “Not just telling them that no money will go to the state and that we get to keep all dollars for local school projects.”

She said she wants to make sure “the approach we take is based on our needs,” she said.

Corbett Elsen, the district’s fiscal services director, said he would consult with engineers and contractors to see where some items could be reworked or postponed.

He said he would bring back a new lower-end total cost for the bond at the April 30 board meeting. Trustees at the meeting could then vote on whether to go ahead with a new round of polling in May.

“We will be looking at the vision of our facilities master plan,” Elsen said, referring to a two-year community process, completed in 2022, that identified the top priorities for new construction or renovation over the district’s five high school campuses.

“We want to tailor it some, while still honoring the process,” Elsen said. “We want to see if there are different solutions we could use, while still achieving our critical needs.”

Roenisch said the district also will need to counter “some deceptive messaging” put out in the community by chief Measure A opponent the Coalition of Sensible Taxpayers.

That included, for example, that the Redwood High School project in Larkspur calls for reconstructing four buildings that were either crumbling or otherwise deficient, not just a new cafeteria.

COST had widely circulated the message that the district was building “an $100 million gold-plated cafeteria.”

“If people are not getting the real facts, it’s going to be real hard,” Harlander said. “If I believed that this district was spending that kind of money on a cafeteria, I wouldn’t vote for it either.”

In fact, she said, the Redwood part of the bond plan covers four buildings and a cooperative meeting complex. It includes replacement of the fine arts and music buildings, now housed in portable classrooms.

As to the cafeteria, new state mandates require that public schools serve free lunches to students. The current school cafeteria is so cramped that students “have to eat lunch in their cars,” Harlander said.

Trustee Emily Uhlhorn said voters “were listening to lies” even though Measure A supporters like herself “corrected it over and over again.”

Roenisch said she was not sure she would support scaling down the bond simply because COST said it was too big, she said. If there were a lower-cost option, it would be to focus on critical needs, not to appease the opposition, she said.

“I’m not one to negotiate with COST,” she said.

Trustee Karen Loebbaka said she knocked on many doors and spoke to many residents. Some seemed sympathetic, but “they’re still thinking about” the COST misrepresentations, she said.

“We were caught off guard by the aggressive opposition of COST,” Loebbaka said. “Some people were playing fast and loose with the facts.”

Beyond the major projects, Measure A would also pay for a host of maintenance items and repairs to roofs, heating, cooling and ventilation systems. Most of the district’s high school buildings are 50 years old or more. Tamalpais High School is 100 years old.

Trustees also said they were “frustrated” by a perception by some voters in the Ross Valley that Archie Williams High School in San Anselmo would receive less benefits from Measure A than Redwood and Tamalpais high schools.

“Archie Williams has had a student community center for 15 years that neither Tam nor Redwood have,” Harlander said. Archie Williams has 10 more classrooms than Tam High, she said.

“We care about equity, so this is frustrating,” Harlander said.

COST leader Mimi Willard did not speak at Tuesday’s board meeting. However, in an email to her campaign supporters after the March election, she said the measure at that time was too large.

“In a victory for common sense, voters rejected Measure A, which would have raised $1.04 billion in new taxes from Tamalpais Union High School District property owners to fund a laundry list of facilities spending, much of which was nonessential,” Willard’s email said.

She repeated the frequent COST talking point that the $517 million bond would actually cost taxpayers $1 billion over its 30-year repayment period, with interest added in.

District officials countered at the time that no school bonds — or home mortgages, for that matter — used the total cost with interest when referring to a bond or a mortgage. They also said they planned to refinance at a lower interest rate as soon as possible, as the district has done with past bond measures.

Those arguments appeared, however, to not have hit home, compared to the “$1 billion” characterization from COST.

“Measure A was fiscally irresponsible and insensitive to those less able to pay,” Willard said. “An economy in which many are struggling is not the time to draw up a dream list for a spending spree.”

She told supporters that “we need to be ready to re-engage” if the district again puts the bond on the ballot in November.