And I don't know, I heard someone donated some chickens to third grade and um you know, even you know, one of our local insurance agents was bringing crayons to our kids last week and different school supplies and our communities really rallied behind. But when you have cooling towers and and millions of dollars and HVAC expenses, like that's that's something, you know, and I think what do we have government for? And and what you know, those are for the projects. it it's hard to do like one by one and take care of you know like building a interstate through through you know we need you know and having a military and but I think big things like when you're putting when you have millions of dollars in needs in a school district that that's something you know hopefully that we can rally together and get the community to support as a quote unquote government thing.
So, because I don't, you know, I don't think any I mean, if I could be like Kenny Dillingham and asking, you know, if someone wants to write a six, seven figure check, we would take it and we would maybe not need to do a bond or override. And so, if we have someone, we we'd appreciate a stepping forward, but until then, I think we're going to go forward with it. Again, he did. ASU got a new practice facility, Mr. Go. It's gonna going to look really sharp. But, you know, and we if we can fund these things with the outside donor, we'd love to do that. But until the until that person steps up, I think we need to stick with the plan and and try to get a bond and override. Are there any community questions, comments, concerns on maintenance and operations? Come on down, state your name, and state your business.
>> Good evening, Sada Chednoff. Um, in regards to the override, I we're going with a 10% that's proposed at this time. Are we going to see teacher raises and effort for staff and teacher retention? >> Yes, absolutely. And I think we don't want to lose any of our precious teacher and our experience index is one of the highest in the state. So, but I also want to reiterate it's not just teacher raises. We need to pay our bus drivers more. We need to pay our fac and so we would like to pay all of our employee classes a little bit more. As we know, inflation 2026, Justin was just talking about gas prices. We want people to, you know, once again, people didn't get into education to be multi-millionaires. It's because they care about the kids in the community. So, keeping up with inflation and just allowing our people, our cost of living is high here in the mountains.
So, yes, that is that's a long answer to say yes, that is one of our priorities. Sada. All right. Well, in Okay, next thing is okay. So, what do the financials look like? And so, what is this going to cost the community? And I know we've had Mark Reer from Stiffel come up before and present to us before and I think he did a very comprehensive um presentation before, but he wants to come back and and talk about, you know, if we go out for a bond and override, what will that cost the taxpayers, truth and taxation, um to to make sure our school is is a safe uh efficient place to learn? What will that cost us? So Mark, thank you for coming down. >> Thank you. Thank you for having me. Uh, Mr. President, members of the board, Mark Reer with Steifol. I was up about a month ago, what, six weeks ago, so some of this may be a little bit of a repeat.
So, uh, appreciate, uh, your patience on that. We've updated some numbers for you. Um, we're here to help. As you know, we were hired by the district to help with, you know, bonding and, uh, bond issuance and tax rates. You know, Arizona's got one of the most complicated property tax systems in the country. And we have to take a very complicated property tax system in the country, and we have to be transparent with voters to show them what it looks like so they can understand it, so they can vote uh intelligently. So, I've got I've got some of that information tonight. I'm going to make it really easy for you.
Um, and I'll we'll dig into any questions you might have. I'm not going to go through every page uh in the PowerPoint presentation. I'm going to talk to you and I'm going to take you to pages I think that are extremely relevant and I'm going to take you to page page five here. I think it is and give you a reminder. This is this is very positive news for your district from my perspective. You've done an an outstanding job in managing your tax rates. This chart shows right here over the last 10 years what your district has set your tax levy at each year. Okay? You haven't had a bond for 10 years, have you? Prior to that, it was another 10 years. The Arizona finance system for K12 public education requires school districts to go out and have bond elections to fund their capital.
That's the system that we live with. And up here in Blue Ridge, it's been kind of few and far between. We appreciate the 2016 bonds, 15 bonds. I I was involved in that. We appreciate that, but it wasn't an extremely large amount of money fair. And you had to spread that around the district. It's been 10 years. And your deferred maintenance is huge. I suppose if you did a a master plan, a capital improvement master plan of all the needs of your district and maybe people behind me and to my left can help. Probably maybe hund00 million. I don't know what the number is. The numbers are huge and the inflation has reared its ugly head on all of us and our construction projects have doubled across the state. In the meantime, you got all this deferred maintenance. You're getting further and further behind. It's been 10 years.
And in the meantime, your tax rates are going down. You haven't had an override, I think, in four or five fiscal years, something like that. You haven't levied a tax for an M override. Okay. As a result, as you can see on our slide here, your tax rate has dropped. So, you've really set it up nice, I would think, with your voters to educate them, communicate them over the fact that you have reduced your primary property tax rate for maintenance and operation. Okay, that's the uh that's the orange orange bar. That's a little more more steady, if you will, but still it's been declining because your tax base continues to grow up here. And remember, the larger our tax base, the more properties we can spread our property taxes to, the lower our tax rate. That's kind of what's happened on your primary. As you can see there, the bond issue, we got a we another thing we have going for us is we're paying bonds off from the prior issues.
So, our tax rate is expected to drop significantly. And so I think um you've really set yourself up um strategically I would think from a very reasonable ask depending upon the amount of the bond that you're going to call. I've got information in here that ranges from 30 million to 50 million. We have time to study it. We have time to prioritize the projects. My guess is you're going to have to prioritize all this capital. You got buses, you got technology, you have you have buildings, right? Um all of these needs and you're probably going to get a spreadsheet that adds up to a lot of money and you're going to have to probably prioritize your bond issue. How big is too big? I'm sure you could use 50 million. That's my guess. I don't know. Um and I'm going to run some numbers for you here.
Show you some numbers. And I'm the bottom line here. It's going to be somewhere between 10 and $12 a month. Bear with me uh to support a bond election in your community. I call that reasonable. We'll get into the override as well depending upon the amount of the override because as you know the override is in addition to the bond. Okay. So I wanted to start there give you my editorial comments. I hope that was helpful. Um, we're getting ready to set the 2627 tax rate, right? We've been working with staff on that and we think there's a good chance once again your bond tax rate is going to drop. Okay, your primary property tax rate, I know staff's working on that. So, as we go into the election year, election year 2627, we're going to set your primary and secondary tax rate. So, let me pause there.
Was that helpful just to kind of summarize that for you? I I know you were aware of that, but I guess as your adviser and coming in from the outside, as I looked at that data, I I think it's it's very reasonable and there's some good news here on that front.
Any questions? All good. We we'll keep moving. Okay. Um this next page is your current bonds. You've only got about 9 million outstanding. Um I like this slide. Here's another good slide in our favor here, right? And we've we've incorporated this in all the mathematics I'm going to share with you. But as you can see here, we got a about three more fiscal years, your debts at about 1.6. And you see it's dropping down to 800,000. It's dropping in half. So by the time the election hopefully passes, by the time we sell bonds, we're going to structure our new bonds around the reduction of your debt to minimize the tax rate as best we can. Does that make sense? So, I I see that as very good news for you as we start to model in a tax rate that we think is reasonable for the community.
So, I I more good news for you on that on page seven. Uh page eight, not going to spend a lot of time. You got over a hund00 million of available statutory bonding capacity under the statute. Not that you would ever go for a hundred million, but it's a formula based on state statutes for K12 public education. You're north of a hundred million. Now, usually when I see that, that tells me that districts have not been out for bond elections very much. You've only got about $9 million in bonds, which is very minimal for a district your size. So, we're all good there. Okay, here's where the fun starts. Bear with me. Um, and I'm going to take you to slide 11 if that's okay. And I I'm sure our friends in the back here are going to have a hard time. But let me let me share with you why we have a 14 column spreadsheet here is the reason why we have to do this is this is exactly what goes in goes in your voter information pamphlet.
So once the once the board calls an election, if you do, probably going to call it in Juneish, right? We got about 60 days. We got some wiggle room in there if you need it. Okay. >> Yeah. We'd have we'd have to call it in May, Mark. >> Okay. >> So, um, we would then once we come to the board and determine a dollar amount of your bond and an override if you elect to go that route, no decisions are being made. then we all have to start working on a voter information pamphlet that will go out to all qualified electors within the boundaries of Blue Ridge Unified. This table will be in that voter pamphlet. And that's why I want to kind of just slow it down just a little bit. Um the you know you have your tax base in column two, right?
That's your that's your assessed valuation. That's it's called the net limited assessed value. This is where the property tax system gets a little bit complicated, but if you take out your property tax statement for your residential home, you'll see a value on there. It says net limited assessed value. That's how they set the tax rates. In column three, we have our projected growth in your tax base. Okay? And we'll be very conservative on that. Um, column four is your your current bonds that we talked about. That was the one six going down to 800,000. That was that chart I shared with you. Okay. We then assume the district would call a $30 million bond in November of 26. If it passes, we can sell bonds, you know, in the first quarter of 27. We've got time. You tell us when you want to sell bonds and we'll go ahead and activate that part of the process.
So, in the first quarter of 27, we have modeled in a $15 million bond. kind of get you going. And then we assumed over the next, you know, 18 months or so, you'd be ready to sell the other 15 million as you finalize your engineering, your design, and your public procurement of all the items that we talked about. So, if we pass a $15 million bond and we sell bonds over, you know, a couple year period, then uh we we will add additional debt service, which is column 10, and an additional tax rate column 11. This is what what we put in here. So, in column 11, you can see what the additional secondary tax rate would be. 26 cents out to about 26 cents goes up to 55 and then and then goes on out from there. Go down to the bottom. The average secondary tax rate to support a $30 million bond issue would be about 47.
All good? That 47 cents then we'll plug into some property values in a moment. But let's finish the spreadsheet here. Um, and this is, I think, kind of cool. Um, if you go up in column 13, our current secondary tax rate to pay back the bonds is about 47 cents. And we're going to set it for next year, right? Uh, this isn't final yet, but we have about 45 cents in there. Why? Your your tax base grew, so we're going to lower your tax rate again. And then you can see um uh what the other uh tax rates are as we head on out. So I think what's nice about this scenario is uh if we set your tax rate next year at 45 cents and we go down to the bottom at 47 cents, we're increasing the tax rate by two pennies. Um and we'll get it we'll put that into perspective in a moment.
But a lot of times people will look at what your current tax rate is and they want to see where it's going. And we're telling you your current tax rate is 47 to 45 cents. And if we stick with the 30 million, we're going to be able to keep it pretty darn close to that. That's very rare, but we're able to do that because of a lot of debt coming off the books as I mentioned to you. Okay. So, I know that was a lot, but let's take the 47 cents right in column 11. Let's take that and let's plug that number into what it would cost somebody who owns a residential home in your in your district. This is where it gets really important. Okay. Okay. On page 12, this is a little better table. This is another table required to be in the voter pamphlet.
So, when people get this in the mail and the voter pamphlet will explain everything we're doing, it will talk about all the projects that you're going to prioritize in the coming couple of months. And so, the community is going to be aware of how the bond money is going to be spent and prioritized. So, we plugged the 47 cents, I'll round up the 48 cents if you don't mind, into the average value of a residential home within the boundaries of your school district, which the county we got from the county. And this is the county's valuation, not market valuation. I got a really good slide on that. The county is not picking up all the the higher valuation of what our property is worth. So, the average value on the county records is about $22,824. Okay. We take that number times 10% residential properties assessed at 10%.
We divide it by 100. Tax rates are per 100 times 48 and it would be $97 a year or about $8 a month to the average residential homeowner in your district to support a $30 million general obligation bond. Um the property taxes are are not always the most fair and equitable. This is the way it is all around the country. the amount of taxes that that we all pay is a function of the value of our property and the tax rate. So if my neighbor's house is twice my house on the county records, they pay twice twice the property taxes. So that's just the way the what they call the advalorum general obligation property tax system works around the country and um and how taxes are paid. Um, we did it on a per $100,000. That's $4 a month. So, you can help extrapolate this.