Trustee spins through money troubles

As I read Huntington Beach School District trustee Bill Wallace’s

“Sounding Off” in the March 3 Independent, I couldn’t help but

chuckle to myself. As Wallace tries to defend now-absent former Supt.

Gary Rutherford, it is painfully obvious that although Wallace’s

trustee bio identifies him as a retired lawyer, his true vocation

should have been as a salesman.

Wallace claims that “every trustee and administrator ... have been

alerted to and working assiduously on these issues for long hard

painful years.” What a joke. The trustees’ and administrative track

record directly contradicts Wallace’s self-congratulatory statement.

First of all, if the so-called “deliberate and thoughtful” budget

process has been going on for four years, why hasn’t any progress

been made? The trustees are sitting on three surplus school sites

(totaling more than 32 acres) that by the school district’s own

estimate have a value of about $2 million an acre. That is $64

million. According to the district’s own numbers, the district is

receiving around $750,000 in rent a year on these properties. Even

ignoring the thousands of dollars the district expends in upkeep on

the surplus properties, the district is receiving less than a 1.3%

return on its already surplus property, a decidedly paltry return.

However, when this budget crisis began, in Wallace’s own words,

years ago, instead of even moving to sell these surplus properties,

it appears that the trustees are going to close at least one and

possibly two elementary schools, displacing hundreds of our children.

Nobody should forget that just three years ago, the district also

lobbied for, and the Huntington Beach voters approved, Measure DD for

the issuance of $30 million in bonds for repair and modernization of

public schools in the district. Each taxpayer in Huntington Beach

will be paying for these bonds for the next 30 years. Millions of

dollars have already been spent modernizing the same schools that are

now on the chopping block. In fact, given a board meeting on March 3,

it appears that the trustees and administrators actually believe that

it will be a windfall for the district to sell (or lease) one of the

new modernized schools and use the money for other purposes, even

though the windfall would come about due at least in part to

squandering designated bond proceeds on schools that will be closed

or for private schools leasing the property. It is against state law

to waste school bond funds, yet the group in charge of monitoring the

use of these bond funds, the Independent Citizens Oversight

Committee, has been strangely silent during the entire process.

It seems shady, at the very least, to spend taxpayer money

designated for public school improvements on sites that you decide to

sell. As of today, the modernization effort continues to go forward

at the schools designated for possible closure with more and more of

the Huntington Beach taxpayers dollars, earmarked specifically for

public school repair and modernization, being spent so that the

trustees can turn that modernization money into revenue to fund the

budget shortfall, including paying administrative and faculty

salaries.

Wallace also claims: “This problem has arisen because neither the

state government nor the federal government will provide the money

for education that each has promised to provide.” It is true that the

district is not receiving the promised money from the state and

federal government, but to blame the problem wholly on these entities

when you are sitting on $64 million in surplus property seems

disingenuous at best.

The trustees and district have represented that the private

schools currently leasing the surplus school sites require two years

notice to vacate. Assuming, that is true, then that bridge should

have been crossed long ago during Wallace and the other trustees’

long, hard painful years of budget issues. It should be noted that

the school district offices are now at a surplus school site where

there is no two-year wait period. The district offices are at least

three times bigger than the district itself claims is needed, and the

entire property is more than 9 1/2 acres, worth $19 million.

In fact, during the debate over Measure DD and its $30 million in

bonds, the issue of selling the surplus properties was raised and

dismissed as unnecessary. One of the arguments set forward by then,

now interim superintendent, Duane Dishno, was that the district

should keep the excess properties in case it needed more schools in

the future.

The parents and taxpayers of Huntington are disappointed in

trustee Wallace and his fellow trustees. Instead of the Independent

apologizing to Rutherford, it is the trustees that owe the children,

parents and taxpayers an apology.

* EVAN SORENSEN is a Huntington Beach resident.