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October 8, 1996
The SUN school board has formed a committee to design and finance the school improvements for the next twenty years. The committee is made up of Jim Dusick, the head of Sun, Max Duran a planner for Los Angeles Unified School System, Nancy Smith, the local Postmaster, and Bill Boyd, a local contractor/Realtor.
Their stunning announcement is that they want to float a $10,000,000 to $20,000,000 General Obligation Bond to finance building a high school. They claim this bond will only be $50 to $100 a home. That's the same sort of lie that you got on Prop A a number of years ago. They said it was only $7 a home and now it's about $140 for our rural homes. That is a 2000% increase. In a General Obligation Bond (GOB) the voter approves the total amount of bonds the School Board can issue. The annual tax payment in their sales pitch is based on a growth rate for the community.
The theory is, as more people move into the community more people will pay off the bonds and therefore the cost per person will remain low. The flaw in that theory is the current bonds only build a school for the existing residents and as you bring in new members of the community to pay off those bonds, you have to float new bonds and taxes to build those new schools for those new residents. The tax for each year is set by the School Board at whatever is necessary to pay off the bonds.
In fact, if you take a situation where the growth rate is planned to be at 5% a year and drops to a zero growth rate, the same $100 per home will be more like $500. to $2000 per year. If you have a situation as we now have where the property values drop, the amount of payments assessed on you can go to thousands of dollars without you having any opportunity to ever vote for a change.
Even recalling the school board will not work since the payment assessed is a mathematical calculation of enough money to pay off the bonds.
This SUN committee with Duran and Dusick wants to allow Spears - who donated between $200,000 and $600,000 worth of services and supplies to Dusick and his pals at SUN - to have the Wallace Canyon site , 95 acres of the Red Rover site for his own future profit, and additional cash/compensation. All of this in trade for only 50 acres at Red Rover.
A year ago a deal was available to get the entire 145 acres Red Rover site, for about $300,000 and have Wallace Canyon for future sale when the market increased or use it in the future for some other purpose. The School could then still receive the $950,000 available with the Wallace Canyon site.
This deal was torpedoed by Dusick and his board after Spears paid him the large campaign contribution. It does not take a genius to realize that Dusickk now wants to shift the burden onto you the taxpayers, give their handler an extremely valuable property and stick our school district with a minimum site. This small site can never be used for mixed purposes. No large number of soccer fields, baseball fields, facilities for volunteers to use, just an urban high school planned by an urban planner who has planned the L.A. Unified Schools, Max Duran.
In December 1995 Max Duran proposed making the school a year round school just like LA Unified. He was shouted down by the parents at the meeting. But, look at who Dusick found to run the site and facilities committee.
Why should we support this school district?
Why should we support Dusick and the continuing dumbing down of
the district? Think about it.
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