Bonds may be back on ballot

PALMER — There’s a lot of construction coming down the pike at the Mat-Su Borough School District, and it’s all going to require bonds to finance the work.

Of course, bond propositions mean votes of the people. So the school board and the borough assembly are considering ways to present the need for this type of indebtedness to get buy-in from the public.

The public didn’t go for the school district’s last round of bonds. Last year, $34.7 million in projects, of which the borough would have been liable for 30 percent with the state paying the rest, didn’t pass muster at the ballot box. The bonds would have paid for things like roofs and flooring and other expensive but, in the eyes of the school district, necessary maintenance items.

That raft of bonds, more-or-less unchanged, might show up again on the ballot this October. The district notes that there are no other funding sources for these projects and they failed last year by a very tight margin — 544 votes.

But close on its heels could be an even larger bond package.

“We’re pretty sure we’re going to be needing bonds for a high school/middle school,” school board President Colleen Vague said at a joint meeting Tuesday of the school board and borough assembly. “Every one of our high schools is over capacity.”

High schools don’t come cheap at $60 million or so. A new one would be located somewhere in the Knik area.

The school board came to the meeting proposing a bond committee be created with borough and school district members to shepherd the bond packages through.

“Once we’re all on the same page this will all go a lot smoother,” said school board member Mike Dunleavy.

Which, he said, doesn’t mean there won’t be disagreements about what the bond packages should look like, just that it would be helpful for the borough and the school board to hammer out those disagreements prior to seeking voter approval for the bonds. That way, he said, it would be easier to educate the public on the need for the projects.

Vague agreed, saying the committee should have as one of its goals to determine, “How are we going to approach this and present it to the community?”

Rather than creating a new committee, the borough assembly seemed more inclined to expand the role of the existing joint school board/borough assembly committee on school issues.

Borough Mayor Talis Colberg pointed out that doing it that way would avoid the need for public hearings to set up a new committee and the time that entails.

School board member Erick Cordero said he hopes the committee would take into account bond fatigue — the phenomenon wherein voters tire of government bodies seeking bond propositions and vote the measures down without considering their merits.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.