Back education at ballot box

First, the bias.

I confess to feeling instinctively warm toward anything that comes under the heading of supporting or improving education. When those are the issues on the table, any questions that arise are tilted for me to the broad, rather than the narrow, view. That makes it a lot easier to come down on the side of the upcoming Measure F.

Five years ago, after long exposure to the shared and tattered textbooks, crumbling buildings and teaching facilities that had been left behind in our local schools by growing old in a rapidly changing society, I enthusiastically supported Measure A, which provided a $163-million bond issue to repair and upgrade those structures. So when our school district of uncommon wealth -- as Newport-Mesa is -- projected a new bond issue of $282 million called Measure F to look to the future after it completed dealing with the immediate problems of the past, my first reaction was again strong support. That hasn’t changed.

But I am troubled that Measure F, which will go before the voters in less than two weeks, is under attack for the way it has presented itself to the voting public. There is enough legitimacy in those attacks to endanger submerging the big picture in a sea of smaller ones. So a little balance is in order in considering Measure F.

The principal criticism has to do with the claim that Measure F will not raise tax rates. This is technically true. It won’t raise the rates, but it could considerably extend the period that we will be repaying the new bonds. So the real question becomes whether the educational benefits from Measure F are worth that possibility. And the answer would seem to me to be a firm, “yes.”

But this disingenuous tax claim was a sitting duck for critics. So was dealing with the scope of Measure F by referring the curious to the school district website where generic educational reforms and improvements were repeated word-for-word for each school in the district. So was accepting $25,000 for the Measure F campaign from a construction firm that profited from Measure A work -- not because of any wrongdoing but because the suggestion of it can outweigh the benefits of the contribution, even when it is one of dozens of other contributors.

So I sat down yesterday to clarify some of these matters with Mark Buchanan, chairman of Citizens for Quality Schools, which is spearheading the Measure F campaign. He said that a second citizen’s oversight group called the Equity Committee has been approved by the Newport-Harbor school board to -- among other jobs -- protect taxpayers if the continuing Newport-Mesa increase in property values on which Measure F will depend for funding turns around.

“If housing prices go down -- and increased income from new home buyers paying taxes at a higher rate tail off,” he said, “the Equity Committee will make sure that the school district doesn’t issue bonds that would trigger a property tax increase.”

So why didn’t the $163-million bond issue passed five years ago take care of the problems that you say the new bonds are needed for?

“Two main reasons. First, it wasn’t intended to. And, second, we found the needs of the schools were much more complicated than we expected. There were lots of hidden costs when we got into them.

“Maybe it would help to compare our schools five years ago to a 60-year-old house with galvanized pipes and wooden window frames and space heating. That house, like our schools, may have been carefully maintained, but nothing could stop it from just getting old. Those are the problems we addressed -- and are still addressing -- with Measure A. Structural aging. With Measure F, we hope to convert our refurbished schools into quality learning facilities designed to meet the sort of ambitious educational goals our parents want and our kids deserve.”

So how did they arrive at the figure of $282 million for Measure F?

“It was a combination of things. How much money would rising real estate values generate balanced with what we felt we needed to complete the job. We discovered with Measure A that this isn’t rocket science. Any number we picked would have generated the same question.”

In the many talks he has given in support of Measure F, Buchanan says he has welcomed “hopeful skepticism”. But some of the criticism has come off much stronger than that -- as almost conspiratorial. It ignores what is probably the strongest argument for the passage of Measure F. That element is trust -- and the local groups and citizens who are expressing it with their support of Measure F.

The district administration, school board and citizen volunteers have worked together to create these two measures, urge their passage and make sure the funds they produce are properly used. They have offered plenty of evidence in the past five years that -- on balance -- they deserve to be trusted with this new proposal. The inevitable glitches shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the highly successful bigger picture.

The dedicated and effective citizen participation in this effort to provide quality public education for our kids deserves our support at the ballot box.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.

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