Wednesday, August 27, 2003

The Fayette Board of Education has screwed up once again, with its school bus pickup plan, and the blame rightfully ought to be laid at the feet of the school superintendent, whose job it is to provide wise leadership to that board. The forming of yet another task force to deflect the parents' ire is, quite simply, more of the phony baloney bureaucrats employ to buy time, muddle the issues, and pass the buck.

We have seen this before with the school bond situation in 2000. The school board then just could not get it through its thick head that a sales tax increase was not the right way to finance new schools, even though the voters had told it so twice.

At the last minute, the superintendent screwed up enough courage to recommend a bond vote, even though he had failed to develop a firm and viable proposal when he first presented his suggestion to the board. The board had to ask him to develop a proposal with specifics in it.

As we all know, the 2000 bond issue was easily approved at the polls, and we got the schools. That was in spite of task force recommendations for a third try at a sales tax. You can see how stubborn some people are, or else how task forces can be stacked with one's own partisans.

We've got to go further than this, however, and ask ourselves where the superintendent gets his counsel in financial matters. The answer is that he gets it from a finance director and perhaps others who seem not to understand the basic principles of public financing.

In previous articles, The Citizen pointed out that the school board sits on a $12 million reserve, and we keep hearing all the time what good financial shape the school district is in. If the children of Fayette County do not receive the educational services they deserve, what's been achieved? When an old miser who lived in poverty dies with millions of dollars which he leaves to a university or church that then squanders the funds on a marble palace, what great good has he done?

When the school board needs in 2003 a $50,000 school bus which can be used for 10 years, why should the taxpayers of 2003 be burdened with the full $50,000 bill? Wouldn't it be fair to let the taxpayers of 2004 to 2012 (who won't all be the same people) pay their share for the use of it? Wouldn't the school board be able to afford 10 school buses immediately, instead of just one, if it spread the cost?

School buildings present an even worse case, because they can last much longer than a bus.

By trying to put the financial burden of these capital investments on current taxpayers, instead of spreading it out evenly over the useful life of the assets, the school board does two things: (1) it creates an inordinately heavy tax burden for current taxpayers, and (2) it compels "fake thrift" and cheats our children of what they could and should receive now.

Imagine a family that deprives its oldest child of a college education because Mom and Dad want to accumulate money to pay cash for the college education of younger children. How sensible is that?

The fact of the matter is that the school board has plenty of money. When it submitted its school construction bond plan in 2000, calling for the repayment of the loan within nine years, the people of Fayette County demonstrated their generosity by voting for it, even though I consider such a rapid repayment schedule as borderline fraud. Claiming poverty because you obligated yourself to pay off in nine years a mortgage that sensible people would pay off over 30 years is virtually fraudulent.

What's to be done about this? It is obvious to me that the board of education needs to get its financial advice from outside the school system. If it did, it would most likely get advice that reflects the basic principles of public financing, which include (1) amortizing capital expenditures over the useful life of the assets, (2) a long-term school building plan, and (3) a sensible and taxpayer-friendly borrowing program which forsakes hoarding. (To collect taxes just to build up reserves simply invites waste. Hoarding is for misers.)

Fayette County citizens want and deserve a quality education for their children, including appropriate school bus service. With thoughtfulness it can all be done at a reasonable cost to the current taxpayers as well as our future generations of taxpayers. Unless the school board is prepared to surround itself with better advisers, it will get itself into the same situation it is in now, which no amount of public relations gimmickry can salvage.

School money wouldn't be tight right now if it weren't for the dumb decision by the 2000 school board to pay off the construction of five new schools within nine years. The result today is needlessly high taxes for repaying the school bonds, which makes the current board understandably hesitant to hike the tax rate for normal school operations.

With better advice than it is now getting internally, the school board could consider developing a long-term capital financing program which (1) anticipates the construction of new school buildings as they are needed and (2) restructures the repayments for the current bond indebtedness, respreading and in the process lowering the bond repayments and the taxes that go with them.

Intelligent planning is what good boards do, instead of making low-level decisions like approving student trips out of the county or the reshuffling of personnel whom they don't even know. We should demand it of this board and insist they get better advice.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayetteville, Ga.

cypaquin@msn.com