001um i called to order the oswego community unit school district 308 board of education meeting can i have a roll call please mr bauman yeah mrs doyle here mrs croner here mr lightfoot present miss morgan yeah mrs moyer here mrs swanson here please rise for the pledge of allegiance pledge allegiance one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all just real quick before we go to public comment i do want to ask the board if we could please move item 8.1 for the food pantry action item to be before information as the folks are here and we want to allow them an opportunity to get that done with is that good with everyone do we need to make a motion for that we want to just move all of section eight ahead of
002seven i think we could um i don't think that anything's contingent on yeah just switch it all together yep so one yes you got so it'll be seven one two three four five i'm still waiting on this to load bob's here from pma2 though so just do the one we'll just do the one so that bob from pma also does although action items are quick let's do them all they're all quick okay yeah we don't take long on these plus bob um he likes to be here with us he just listen congratulations bob congratulations all right so moving real quick to public comment item 4.1 was there anyone one person you have just the one i have yeah okay all right thomas chilek wait i didn't read the thing oh oh it's sorry yeah that's
003okay um okay real quick two things so on behalf of the board of education i would like to thank the public for attending tonight's meeting we value the feedback we receive from our residents and encourage everyone to take an active interest in their public school system residents interested in speaking to the board this evening are asked to have completed a comment card and presented it to the secretary to the board when the secretary calls your name i ask that you come to the microphone state your name for the public record and provide your feedback please note that comments are limited to five minutes per person and that no discussion of personnel matters or responses to questions are permitted the board does not participate in discussion during public comment follow up to your questions or concerns
004will be addressed by administration through the contact information provided on the comment card thank you thomas chilek to whom it may concern i applaud the school's attempt at remote learning but in its current state it is unsustainable i took a look at my seventh grader's email and found 120 emails in the first week alone with that amount of email is impossible to sort through what is important and what is not it is not reasonable for a 12 year old to sort through that amount of email while also completing his assignments this is just my son alone i do not know the volume my daughter is experiencing i am not a teacher and i do not have the means to support my child's academics while both my wife and i fulfill our full-time jobs with two
005children in the family and college planning underway with my senior student there is not enough time in the evening to run through the daily assignments identify where my son is struggling run a household and prepare dinners and lunches i am disappointed in the board's last minute decision to go full remote and would like to appeal that decision and encourage in-person learning i understand this is a difficult time and with its many challenges but i fear the level of education my students are receiving will leave both my children at a disadvantage it would be very disappointing that with all the effort in conducting remote learning if it would be found to be completely ineffective again i appreciate and commend everyone's efforts i know these are not easy decisions please consider in-person learning kind regards thomas jillick
006item 5.1 board member comments just start over with tony you assume um i just want to say that first of all we have to thank everybody in the district that got school rolling on the 24th of august and it as far as i can tell it was a phenomenal rollout as far as getting all the people to do what whatever they could and as much as they could to help these kids get started and i know from talking to my many very um verbal friends and neighbors and people that i know in the community that it has not been easy on the people at our home i know that as a teacher as i teach i see these kids telling me you know my daddy says don't open the office door and and all i
007can say is we're gonna have to adjust some things to make it in this new era we're going to have to adjust parenting we're going to have to adjust teaching we're going to have to adjust expectations as a community and and we're all going to have to learn to live in a different world because it's not the same as it used to be and it's not going to be the same as it used to be just because we go back to school so i really hope that people take that to heart and think about it because it is naive and dangerous to think that you can go right back to normal that's not how it's going to work and i i commend everybody in the district i know everybody's super tired i hope people who
008are teetering people who are having a really hard time going forward we'll give it a couple more weeks because this is a very hard time of year in general and it can get easier with a pattern and i'm rooting for everybody to do their best i really am go um so yeah first of all thanks to to everyone in the district that got school rolling alerting teachers staff support staff um it was a difficult start we as the board asked for some audibles and you fulfilled those in short time and school started i i know there were some issues district-wide i know there were some issues technology issues fortunately in our household we only dropped briefly a couple of times on monday after that everything went smooth the kids had attention it was a routine
009it has gone better than i thought it would however and i realize that there is a lot of struggling going on something i didn't even think about the the physical issues that students and people are going to incur with the time that we that they're online and i've noticed this with with my own kids now that a week into it we have neck and shoulder and stuff issues and that comes along with online learning so that along with some of the social emotional things that are going on the the lack of of really personal interaction even though we are live we have the the visuals and the audio there with some of the friends of the classmates doing it in in our instance in the loft or or the office you know alone is not
010well for for their well-being so as well as it is going i think for many of us it's still disappointing this is the situation we're in we're all making the best of it but i still will ask and plead that the district our student services department is is doing their best to reach out to locate the students that need the services our special education department that are identifying the students that need the services and the help because again yes things are going well but we really need to make sure we're watching out for those that that need the help i just want to echo comments from other board members about thank you for all your hard work and huge thank you for the teachers and teaching assistants and building personnel who have worked so hard
011to make that first week as successful as humanly possible obviously we knew there were going to be some things that were great and some things that were maybe not so great and could use some tweaking and i just think that from what i have seen and heard and what we have experienced in our house everyone's doing a great job and putting in a huge effort and i'll just save it leave it at that thank you and then just for me also just very briefly again to echo the comments our situation in my house also um better than i had hoped for expected but i have so much gratitude for everybody who changed their plans all these times for us and still pulled it off i wouldn't have guessed that that things had been rushed or
012changed or anything other than that i i i'm not gonna lie i kind of eavesdropped but i liked what i heard which is the only reason i'm telling you to shop the first day um but everybody had engaging things the kids were happy to see each other the teachers were there and connecting and and and i've seen that they all had been given solid training listen it's a fly it doesn't bite i mean that's biology not physics we're going to talk about the fly for a little while just because i see him um but but the reality is our teachers um you can tell that they were prepared for how do i do this that first day and we have our administrators to thank for that so i really appreciate all the work that you
013put in i know that it was exhausting and that your work is not even close to over because that was just the first week and now you've got things to look at for what will it look like as the year changes so i just want to say thank you um we know that it's not over just because it felt good for us for the first week we know that you're doing a lot more work so thank you very much for all of that that's where i'm going to leave it listen you folks over there are going to separate you budget cuts i'm referring for people that can't see what's going on there's a fly buzzing around that's being very distracting and i was making an ill attempt at humor that the fly is still here
014and we can still afford flies well we we can't afford flies that's something right um built-in biology specimens so that's all we've got four five one five two board committee reports brent do you wanna go or do you want me to go i'll start and then you can fill in so the the as we talked about at the last board meeting we wanted to try to get two finance meetings in before we have to vote on the budget at the end of september the first meeting was this last two tuesday um feels like it was yesterday doesn't it ruth we chrissy took us through took us through the budget took us through a bunch of the numbers thank you for providing all the information that the finance committee typically looks at namely one of our
015favorite documents okay my favorite doctor is um we have about uh eight year rolling average uh by budget line item and we can look at ups and downs and all those type of things so we spent a little bit of time um as we always need to to educate a few folks that haven't been with us as long as we've been on on the group and and we needed to work through some things but uh i think the the committee was appreciative of all that information um we did look at the budget cut information that we had made um and over the last two sessions and again the the reason why we asked to have a couple of finance committee meetings was i was pretty sure we were going to have questions that we couldn't
016answer in that first one and wanted to be able to give those folks an opportunity to ask questions and get them answered before the boat board votes um so it was it was a good it was a good meeting um you know i i was encouraged ruth i don't know i'll let you comment as well miss tyler and informed us that there's you know she's been able to make some updates since we initially saw the first budget um things things are looking better they're still dire but they're a little bit rosier than they were before and i thought good questions as various members of the committee asked through different items and and things that we're looking at and we have to look at it's not fun it never is and we're gonna we're gonna work
017through it i think ruth what would you add to that um i guess i i would just say some of the things we're gonna see here tonight that we talked about um at that meeting i would just add that those meetings are available to the public if anyone would so desire to attend and there's always opportunity for public comment like they can't be part of the discussion but there's opportunity for public comment so you know but i think you pretty much covered it that's good i guess one question is is there any of the you know the bulk of the meat that stuck out to you um to to share right now the biggest concerns of the committee some of the more important questions they're they're asking answers to that we could look forward to
018discussing and hearing anything more well pressing than others that the committee was concerned with other than the fact that yes it's a deficit so there's there's high level issues and there's ancillary issues right so ancillary issues are the types of things that the board itself is working through like um what's happening with transportation what's happening with people that might not be 100 utilized right now they're asking those types of questions and those aren't things we're going to really spend time answering i think we're going to be um the bulk of the questions are focused around and maybe it's just the way my brain works so ruth if you have other um like i try to compartmentalize what we're looking at so eight million dollar deficit 4 million is is because of the changes or the
019lack of positive change in funding from the state of illinois and there's that other four million and that number has a lot of leeway i don't want to say leeway in like it's going to go away but there are things that could happen that could cause that number to narrow um or to stay where it is and i think it's it's going to narrow and point is i think there's some specific things that we're going to we're going to talk about we might bring back to say hey this is what the finance committee recommends we look at or consider of how we get that four million that's controllable are there ways to to shrink that down and i think we've already kind of explored some of those and many are probably going to be a
020no but some are possibly um you know like i think like no that wasn't in that meeting i've had too many meetings and phone calls ruth what else could you add to that no i i would agree that most of the questions just focused on the what-ifs like like you said brent the there's the four million in a lack of increased funding from the state that we know that's going to be an issue and then the other portion is there's quite a bit of flexibility or things that are going to potentially impact that number um and it's gonna be hard to know really i mean because some of those are related to time and so many unknowns that we're dealing with even just in making decisions to go back to school you know those everything
021impacts that and like likely we're gonna hear it tonight but like we heard that um the bids for ppe some of the supplies right considerably less expensive than what we were paying just a few months ago sorry if i'm stealing your thunder um i was going to say do you want to do you want to move some of this to that discussion yeah we can i was i was trying to answer matt's question there were a lot of really good questions at all different levels from all of the members of the committee they were all very engaged in the conversation and um asking good questions so and i think it was i thought i saw through social media at least in our neighborhood there was a member who was able to come back and started
022to push some information out that was sharing that some of that deficit information and talking about where it was looking from talking about the uh the ebf and so forth so um i i applaud the i don't recall seeing that in in some of the years past with some of the committee work but i was i was encouraged that that's come back and it wasn't a a a damning comment about the district and what was being done but it was an informative post by the by the committee member and i thought that was really terrific for them to go out yeah one of the things that we one of the things we talked about i don't know how this will work itself out but you know just explaining hey unfortunately we've gone through budget cuts
023before there were things at that time that we couldn't say yes to but maybe now we have to because we're out of options right so those were the types of conversations and i i don't know if i want to put the mood on it but there what there wasn't panic and and there wasn't anguish there was a sense of this is the reality and let's let's work let's work through this yeah good problem solving is a great thing i'm glad to hear that all right item 5'3 superintendent's report all right good evening board before i share my report with you i thought we'd take a few minutes to enjoy some pictures from the first day of school so we're going to take a minute and 40 seconds to listen to it see a video and
024see what was happening on the first day of school maybe so that's what happened in the buildings i think this is excellent [Music] oh [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so those were a few snapshots from the first day of school and on august 17th our teachers began the school year like we usually do with an institute day and on the 17th i took the opportunity to address the staff remotely and it wasn't convocation it wasn't a fun video that we were able to do last year but there are some things that i you know that you need to you need to talk about every year and some of those things where we talk about mission we talked about uh core values we talked about what our core beliefs are as educational
025leaders i talked about the first 72 hours of school and stressed that this year may be even more important than previous years on being creative and how we build our relationships with our students and that's basically where the normal year started i stopped and remote began because on the wednesday thursday and friday we had our remote learning uh remote planning days with the staff where we provided them with professional development and planning and collaboration time as they prepared for the students and on august 24th it was a historic day for not only school district 308 but many other school districts in the state of illinois and across our nation as we began starting the 2021 school year remotely as in any school year we you know we had some we had some issues and we
026worked through them just like we always do and we've handed out over 5000 devices now for remote learning we are providing meals to our students we are we have employees working in the four locations where the kids connection is currently at working with our youngest students in their remote experience and um and on the 28th we'll be sharing a plan for what it will look like when we return to in-person learning and what metrics we will utilize and that will uh somewhat dictate when that when that happens so uh friday i um i wrote to the staff after the first week and there's a couple quotes did i ended up i ended the the uh uh the correspondence with and the first is the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step i
027think we've probably all heard that quote and the second one was faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase and that's a quote by dr martin luther king because we started our journey together we don't know how long we'll be on this path but we all have to have faith in ourselves that we will be successful and so the motto this year is instead of just we got this it's together we've got this and i'd just like to state a big thank you to all of our staff because for all the work that went into school prior to school starting and all the work that's happening now and that will come throughout the year i'm super proud of everyone and that's my report for this evening thank you all
028right item six unless there's any questions can i have a motion to approve i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 6.1 minutes from the august 10 2020 board of education meeting open and closed sessions and 6.2 acknowledgement of foia requests received by the district second mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot aye mrs croner aye mr bowman aye mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye motion passes 7-0 item 7.1 approval of intergovernmental agreement with the kendall county food pantry i make a motion to approve the intergovernmental agreement with the kendall county food pantry as presented second mrs swanson mrs toriel aye ms morgan aye mrs croner aye mr bowman aye mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot aye motion passes 7-0 and i know that we have some representatives here from the kendall
029county food pantry um i don't know if you want to introduce yourselves and and share what you're looking forward to slash hoping doesn't happen profound really just something that we will remember no pressure uh is put together a bunch of different pieces themselves really exciting thank you we're so excited all right item 7.2 i have a motion to approve i make a motion to approve the 2020-21 board of education priorities and initiatives as presented second sorry second mrs croner hi mr lightfoot hi mrs moyer hi miss morgan aye mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye mr bauman aye motion passes seven two zero wait we have two board members no seven zero we're gonna go with that um as you can tell i think that everyone's a little bit relieved tonight a little less stress um
030at the moment so seven three i make a motion to approve a five-year lease to own agreement with american capital for three copiers located in the rios print center at the district administration center second miss morgan aye mr lightfoot aye mrs doyle aye mrs swanson aye mr bauman aye mrs moyer aye mrs croner aye motion passes seven zero item seven four i make a motion to approve the personnel report as presented second mrs doyle i miss morgan aye mr lightfoot no mrs moyer aye mrs croner hi mrs swanson no mr bauman aye motion passes five two 8.1 information okay item 8.1 is uh information regarding a ppe supply and equipment bid for items that we will eventually need when we return to in-person learning so rob and christy yep so a bid was released for
031hand sanitizer disinfectant wipes and kaivac machines and those are the machines that go in and clean bathrooms they're touchless they clean and sanitize bathrooms as our expected costs on those items were to exceed the bid threshold of twenty five thousand dollars so we'll start with the hand sanitizer uh that was bid in one gallon jugs at the estimated monthly quantity that we would use which is right around 2500. the plan is to keep hand sanitizer in each room and in office spaces the quantity listed there is an estimated monthly quantity however we'll only purchase as we need those we need to refill the recommendation is to award that item to lube matrix pumps are for those gallon jugs that would be a one-time purchase or to keep some on stock for those that break that
032the recommendation is to award that to inkjet at 98 cents a pump for the disinfectant wipes we bid a few options here so that we were as prepared as we can be for in case there are other shortages or shortages in the supply chain coming down the road and for to accommodate various size rooms and class size class sizes and usage again those these quantities are estimated monthly quantities and orders will be placed as needed so we'll start with jenko uh we are recommending that they be awarded the 200 count container of wipes at 731 a container as well as the roll of 400 count dry wipes at 427 container and i'll explain why uh dry wipes in a moment uh we'll move on to unique and we are recommending their alternate bid of 800
033count wipes at 45 dollars a container and then next for unique is the quartz size and virix and virex critical care which is a disinfectant at 1064 a quart and that chemical will be used with the dry ripe excuse me dry wipes we have buckets already we'll put the dry wipes in there pour the disinfectant over the over and essentially make our own wipes so that's why the dry wipes and then finally to unique also are the 17 kaivac machines uh this will give every school at least one kaivac and this purchase would be funded with through the cares act grant questions okay all right item 8.2 or is it 7.2 8.2 yes is uh information item that contains an earlier discussion that the board had in regards to bond financing and restructuring and we
034have mr bob lewis here and christy to present to the board and we are up reviewing those four scenarios that we presented er that bob actually presented in june uh bob does have updated rates and he'll go over those and we are looking for guidance on which scenario you'd like to move forward with so that we can begin that restructuring process thank you so to begin with i'm just going to review some key items give you a market update and then we'll walk through those scenarios which are the same fours before except we've updated the interest rates to reflect the current market so this is the mmd index which we use in our industry to monitor trends in municipal bond market which i presented many times before this data set here you're seeing goes back
035to 2003 just the reason i'm showing you this is give you some historical context just so you see an idea where interest rates are at when we talk about interest rates when we borrow uh for car payment home mortgage you have one rate when municipal bonds are sold each maturity has a different interest rate so we look at various points on the yield curve you have the one the five to ten the twenty so the ones that are most important to look at here the five and the ten year because the financings that we're talking about are relatively short so when you go across the chart you can see that this index is at historic lows it's really hard to get an idea just from this side what's been happening here this year so i
036use the same data set on this slide but i just show it from the beginning of the year so we had reached all time lows on this indices our index in early march and then the covid crisis hit us and the rates shot up precipitously across the municipal bond market but then things began to stabilize as the fed and congress took action uh many things which are too too much to recap here but those things help bring stability and confidence back to the municipal market and you can see since mid may have been relatively stable with some recent increases but still uh near historic lows so just keep in mind where these where this looks like compared to the prior chart so this is just a reminder of the credit ratings just like we as
037individuals where we have our credit score school districts cities villages park districts everybody has a municipal bond rating from usually one of these companies usually s p or moody's the other two are less frequently used your moody's rating has trended downward because of the financial struggles the district has had it's now at an a2 with a negative outlook the negative outlook was assigned just because of the the difficulty the district was having balancing this budget and so hearing what i heard tonight about the you know with the state having to maintain its uh revenues and you're not getting an increase and having another deficit it's going to put more pressure on this rating um unfortunately so you may see it tick downward a couple more notches so unless you're able to balance the budget which
038i know it's going to be a struggle to do in these times with no additional state funding so let's just do an overview of your outstanding bonds this slide we showed before it's a summary of your outstanding principle only this is doesn't include the interest payments and your total principal as of right now is around 275 million you'll pay down about 15.4 million this year your 10 back 10 year payback percentage is right at 66 percent that's actually a much improved credit statistic they'd like to see you know they measure and look at what that's at the 10 year and you know when to get into the 60s 70s that's really improved statistic which means you've gone you've issued debt and you've paid down a lot of it and you haven't issued a lot of
039new money bonds for several years so that's ratio will naturally improve under those conditions the two series that we're talking about we're funding tonight in this final phase were both issued in 2011 and uh can constitute the you know the bulk of the callable principle for the next few years and what does that mean it's callable when you have a home mortgage or any type of personal debt that we enter into you can pay it off at any time it's subject to you know your own individual choice with municipal bonds for a period of time it cannot be called and refinanced and that's just a traditional feature so that your bond investors who purchase your bonds do the the investigation to research it are given usually eight to ten years before that call option kicks
040in so this is what your current debt levy looks like so this is the principal and interest and just as a reminder um the board the last time we did bonds instituted a a plan where we would raise the levy as you can see until it got to around 35 million dollars and then um and the reason for that because the plan before that was maintained at 30 million but the board decided it was a better strategy for it to pay down the debt faster than to extend it out and just you know get to the point where the levy was falling naturally and the the benefit of that is obviously less debt service paid over time and so now we're at the point where those bonds are callable where we can complete the plan
041that that board instituted with some variations on it ultimately sorry this thing keeps sliding down my glasses are steaming up um so let's look at then at how those options are uh set forth uh these are just some characteristics of 2011 bonds in case you're wondering the average interest rate on the 11 bonds that are callable is five and a quarter percent the average interest rate in the 11 a bonds that are called call those 4.85 percent so it's considerably higher than where we're at in the current market so this is just a recap of the phases we already talked about phase 1a was in 16 phase 1b was in 17 and this is phase 2 if you will which is the final final step here to complete what the the debt levy will look
042like now you do have other callable bonds as you saw on our page but those other callable bonds you would hopefully just be fined refinancing those to lower the interest payments and not necessarily changing the this trajectory of your debt service payments so scenario one uh let me just explain a little bit of the color coding here the gray area represents the current debt structure that we just saw in the prior graph the blue columns represent your referendum bond payments uh the shaded blue are or historic payments levier 19 is what you collect in 20 to make payments uh you make payments in august october february and april so be february april 2021 is paid from this levy the green represents your non-referendum bonds you have one payment remaining on those uh that you have
043not levied for 11 year 20. so in this scenario we maintain the overall levy at 35 million dollars with a decrease in three years and another decrease three years after that um i think christie summarized for you in uh your board update that you know with this option this one has the most savings associated with it if the board is inclined to do additional non-referendum bonds in the next year or so this if you did that that would cause an increase in the overall levy because you'd have to put a green bar right on top of the blue bar so you'd raise the overall levy in this scenario scenario two is one that um instead of the way i contrast it to the other one is it's sort of similar plan doesn't necessarily plan for
044the issuance of additional non-referential bonds if the if the board wasn't going to do that but it provided more immediate reduction in the debt levy versus scenario one with a large decrease occurring in levier 27. scenario three is the version that uh maintains the levy at around 31.7 million it does and then with a decrease occurring in 27. prior and prior scenarios when we showed this to you last time your decrease didn't incur after levy are 29 but because interest rates have come down we were able to put a decrease in levier 27 uh 28 and 29. this one would allow the continuation of the use of non-referendum bonds without an increase in the overall bond levy just to clarify as i'm making those statements that legally nothing prevents you from issuing non-referent bonds in
045any of the scenarios is what happens to the overall levy if you did so can you advance your slide oh sorry that that was scenario three i just talked through so scenario four is one that would uh lower the levy further than any of the other scenarios which of course means you have to push off more levees so this one had the least amount of savings associated with it and but would allow you to issue the non-referendum bonds without an increase in overall levy and still have an overall decrease too so this is a summary of the options and hopefully your board member the board members all have this in front of you and i did provide what it looked like in june if you want to compare and contrast between the two to see
046how the lower interest so two things happen the interest rates are lower than um when we ran the analysis and two i we were cons we added a a an additional 50 basis points or 0.5 percent on top of that this time around we update the current market which is lower and we only added 0.35 because you're getting closer to when you would you would take action um so in here you can see that the the levy reduction for scenario one is 14 million and uh the scenario two is just slightly less at 13 and then scenario three you know goes down another couple million dollars or 2.6 million 11 million and then scenario 4 has the least amount of savings has the biggest decrease in one scenario to the next because that one's pushing
047off the most debt service we did pv each of those at different rates of two percent three percent um the higher the present value rate the the the lower those savings would be i'll just contrast this to the next slide if you look at you know scenario one had the least um uh improvement in savings it went from 10 million to 14 million the next one went from 9 million to 13.6 i guess that was approximately the same scenario 3 went from 5.8 million to 11 million and scenario 4 actually had a smite slight increase before 1.2 million but now uh even even with that one you're uh shown to have lower debt service about six million dollars per year and then we calculate the impact to the taxpayer [Music] on the far right side
048as well under the various scenarios so that is the summary of the presentation and you know at this point i'll take any questions you might have on the four options that are presented to you any questions i have just won so it doesn't look like there's a whole lot of savings for the taxpayers so i know i was i believe i was on the board when we decided not to extend the debt but to just pay it so that's kind of where i'm at i mean i guess my question is what's the goal right like is our goal as a board to save the taxpayers money or are we you know are we selling bonds for technology or buildings buildings or i i think that um my personal opinion is that the biggest thing that
049we can do for this district and community is shed this debt as quickly as we can we work with it's out to 2034. um and when we look at scenario one it looks like every three years or so there is there's a steady decrease there's some slight savings that go along with it and we'll go back to to that slide it was in 2024 it looks like it drops for three years and then it drops again for two years and then drops again uh consecutively and it looks like in the the taxpayer savings it was about or so a scenario one if that was correct if i was looking at the current versus the june savings it's not significant but it's it's something but overall that's important but the biggest scenario is that we can
050shed this this debt because these 30 million dollars 35 million payments which will will continue to go down but they are being connect collected as part of our property taxes and when you know the board pushes out or asks for a referendum and people wonder where is the money going what's the money being used for you realize that it sounds like our our budget is a large budget and it is but over 30 million dollars annually is going just to pay for these buildings and that mortgage payment i think that gets lost in the bigger picture and as soon as we can shed that that debt with the least expense to to the district the better off we are look i'm i'm all on board with us um continually monitoring the situation looking for opportunities
051to refinance bonds for cost savings due to lower interest rates i think that's a great thing but then i'm i'm all in agreement with matt that the best thing we can do for long-term financial health of the district and our taxpayers is to pay the debt down quickly um versus and i and i say that that's versus i don't want to say artificially but that's the only word i think pops in my mind if doing things to ex to push debt into further years simply so that we have a window for literally only the next three years um to sell what what i call a back door referendum of selling additional bonds to pay for yes i agree needed maintenance and technology um but i guess that's where i'm at i'm i'm all for scenario
052one yeah for me i i do agree with this my only concern my only concern that would lead me more toward two is because as you said what you lovingly call a back door referendum the reality is that's it's not a backdoor or anything um it's something that we all know the voters said last year we wouldn't need well the voters don't know inside we i only have one front door right there this back door right there yeah that goes nowhere all right you win that one that's good but the reality is you've even said yourself and i've sat at this table and heard you say over and over and over that we're we're going to need d7 bonds just to keep things going we're looking at an eight million dollar deficit we know that
053that's a reality we also know that this is a time when our community is financially struggling in these next three four years so i would say that given that it's it's completely irresponsible to think we wouldn't need to do something to keep our doors open with the uncertainty that we're seeing in our financial forecast this is where i'm at well look i i understand your i understand your point however bond and interest payments have nothing to do with the operation budget no they don't but they do contribute to the total tax dollar amount that comes out of people's pockets so if we're saying that we're going to need a total tax and this is something that you and i have argued for many many years but the reality is that what why stop now i
054mean this is what we do so but the reality is we we need money to keep doors open when we can come back in we're in a community that's financially struggling right now so something has to give and i would argue that if we need to take additional bonds out to pay for facility costs and things like that that the people who will benefit from those facilities improvements should take some of the burden that they come through in future years as well as the people now that's why i would argue i wouldn't go so far as going back to the 31 but i would argue that at least with two you know it it flattens it out it gives the bigger decrease in 2027 it gives those two years in a row and then a
055nice bigger one that at least kind of spares a little bit of it and kind of hedges our bets against the need that we're gonna we really are gonna have a need for this it it i can't unless we're going to make some deep deep cuts to things that people love dearly it's it seems pretty likely and lori i would just sorry this is ruth croner so i would like to add that you ali you mentioned that you didn't see a lot of savings but i'm seeing here two of them are over 500 of savings unless i'm reading that wrong and i think our voters think that is a lot of money they did not want to approve a referendum on the ballot that would have increased their taxes by thirty dollars so i would
056think that five hundred dollars is actually would be pretty significant 500 is a it's a good chunk of money but on my tax bill that goes to the school district it's well i agree i'm but i'm saying if you're saying it's not a big savings i think that i'm just i mean people were upset of a potential increase of 30 so to potentially save 500 is kind of a lot i mean yeah i'm still a scenario one i don't want to kick the can down the road i just want to pay it off and i think we have to find some sort of balance between now and then like that's our responsibility is to look at the whole picture and not just which is also why we do this in phases because it does give
057us the opportunity to look at the current financial climate and what we can see better now we would never have guessed the last time we re did our bonds that this was what we were going to be looking at this year it it nobody could predict this so how are we how are we to say that we're going to ignore the reality that we very much planned to have and and i can completely respect wanting to to get rid of that sooner what i'm looking at is a 700 000 difference overall in the levy the estimates of the levy savings um and i'm looking at a difference in in tax increase or excuse me tax reduction of about 17 bucks a year on a 250 000 home and actually it doesn't look a heck of
058a lot different except it can really help just a little bit more for people that really need the extra money the next two three years to recover from this a hundred bucks will make a difference for a lot of our families right now so that's why i would say two would be my preferred they're both over five hundred dollars in savings neither of them significantly impacts our overall cost it's not really kicking the can so much down the road as saying we got a lot of things that nobody ever planned for so let's just make sure that we can not sink other families over 100 bucks so that's pretty much where i'm at i have a question for bob bob you kind of mentioned that for even in your presentation didn't sound that good so
059one two and three can you say what you see as a professional as the advantages or disadvantages well it really depends on the goals of the district so if you know from a purely financial perspective central one is most advantageous because for the reasons that have been stated here it will pay down the debt the fastest save the most money but you know because you really have three different goals here that you're trying to balance out save as much money as possible get rid of the debt and try to and you know try to provide some tax relief and i know it was an issue all of them provide tax relief but it's the timing of that tax relief you know different ones provide tax relief earlier to current taxpayers at the expense of future
060taxpayers and and then of course i guess i have four not three tony the fourth one would be you know if the the importance of needing to do the the non-referendum or backdoor referendum bonds of um for capital projects and what do you want the impact of those to be when you sell them do you want to be neutral and then then you want scenario three if you um want a modest increase when you do them then you want scenario two if you want to you know the bigger increase then you do scenario one so you really have to as a board prioritize those things and rank them and what's most important and then choose the option that goes with it i know you probably want me to just tell you which option but it's
061really hard for me no i don't really want you to tell us but i think that your opinion matters because this is what you do for a living so that's on the way here i was thinking i'm just gonna ask him but the the better rating gives us a better interest rate correct which saves us more money right which you could argue that number one if you do that then you'll actually end up putting yourself in a better position because you'll get a better rating right and i was going to state for the record that ruth croner and ali are actually in agreement because when they're talking about 500 that's scenario one or scenario two yes so i i have a question in any scenario is it a possibility we look at i say the
062last three years kind of really stick out for some some reason 32 33 and 34. as we restructure we're talking about lower payments do we have an option or is it an option to maintain our levy payments as it is and reduce the timeline even less yeah so if i can jump back a few slides here so let's say you did this one and you have these years here go back to this slide those outer years consist of these payments so when those become callable in 26 that's when you you are presented with another choice i suppose if you know you can refinance those at the time and just you know lower these hopefully by the same amount of savings each year or do what you're suggesting that and take some of these payments and
063move them up to here and you know it'd pay them off sooner but still have a decrease in the overall levy but those bonds we don't have the option of doing that currently with those bonds no i mean if you were to do them today that called it's six years out so two things come into play that are disadvantage of that is the the irs says you can't do an advanced refunding of that that's anything that refinances it more than 90 days for the call date otherwise it has to be sold taxable so that would be a long financing to be sold taxable you'd be paying an extra 60 basis points 70 basis points per maturity secondly when you do an advanced refunding like that those proceeds go into an escrow fund for six years
064while they're in the escrow fund you're earning interest but the interest rate you'll be earning on those would be very low because it's invested in u.s treasuries which have a very low return right now so it'd be taxable and very inefficient to do them today which is why we were like the bonds you're doing today why wait to get closer to the call dates make it more efficient and that's obviously paid off a lot you have you're right next to your call dates and rates have come down substantially but that's a great question matt because i'm sure most a lot of people look at those bars and they see those high points which is what we're trying to take care of now and it begs the question of well what if i paid it off
065now do a do i get anything for that it's it's unfortunate because you're looking 14 years out so it's you're still a couple of class years out of our senior year you know our senior class coming in where they're going to see that debt eliminated and hopefully alleviates a lot of the struggle and issues that these boards you know have gone through for for so long right i mean that's uh you've you've heard me say it before matt um i i'm i'm always trying to look for long game and and at some point that we can't see today if the district is growing in size and we need to add buildings or replace buildings we need to have a low balance sheet that gives us all sorts of options or in the miraculous case the
066state decides and the country decides to really really fund education well in that scenario we're talking about two million you know the bond you know this debt service really isn't our our operating portion although it's it's collected you know all together we see it all together in our tax bills but it's still a separate fund from operating and what we would expect the state or the federal government to fund as far as operating expenses so savings here is not going to help us with our budget problems that we're facing correct clear yeah the overall tax bill if we went with one where we spent less on debt service now the total tax bill which is comprised of debt service and our operating needs which is where we find the biggest shortfalls that total number would
067decrease but the operating need would be still be increasing but it would fill in that as well because this is only half of the picture right you know so i'm looking at this going i'm i'm not for raising property taxes in a hole because as as a whole we have to pay a dollar amount that includes both of these things and right now i don't think that our community has said to us that they want to pay more property taxes as a whole and i think that we can't tell what's going to happen in 14 years we didn't know what was going to happen in 12 months so i'm saying that when we're at a point where our community has just recently even as this was going on said we can't take more property taxes
068and we're facing financial pressures that we know we're going to need more funding that it it doesn't save us enough in the long run in the kicking the can it doesn't it doesn't we don't save enough on the long term to make it worth it to the cost to the taxpayers as they're financially struggling right now it's not a huge difference it's two million bucks a year which makes me laugh to think uh it's just two million bucks because it's two million dollars but in a budget our size with debt as large as we have i mean every little bit really can help and and i just can't see why we wouldn't give them even give our community even that little bit of tax savings and why we would ask them when we know darn
069well that we are facing a financial issue and that we're looking at decisions that nobody's going to want to make because we're looking back at ideas at some point very soon that we threw out for years because they were too impactful and we we know we're looking at this now i feel like it's very short-sighted to only be looking at half of half of what that impact is and not looking at the operations it it feels like this would be that two would be a happier middle ground that could give everybody a teeny bit of relief because we might not need those bonds for a year or two years tops but it could give everyone a little bit of relief this year next year when they're still recovering financially from all of us it just
070feels like the right thing to do to give everybody a little bit of a tax break now because it's not giving us that much of a savings for the next 20 years that's just why i think that that way and and i'm trying not to laugh because this is a serious matter yeah but next month we're going to vote to raise taxes yes because we need the funding we're going to levy yes well i just you know because you made a comment about how we don't want talking about only half of it no we don't want to and this we can control that we know we need this is an area that we have an opportunity to create a tax savings so to not take that tax savings when we can have a minimal impact
071what you're saying is you're okay increasing the total tax bill that our taxpayers are going to get because you're willing you're not going to vote for it but we are going to ask to levy for cpi and we're also going to say at the same time not only are we going to be increasing your cpi but the reality is we're increasing the other half of your tax bill in the next few years when we know we're going to need more it's just but scenario one saves the most money in the long term but what about the people who in the three years now are struggling more financially and this will make a bigger difference to the overall well-being of the community for the next few years by getting just a little bit of savings well
072scenario one they're getting a little bit of savings in the first year when they need it more what i'm saying is that with two you get a little bit more now when people need it more and that gives a little bit of a relief not a ton but a little bit of a relief without a huge cost you're assuming that the economy is going to be even remotely predictable it's not but we can't assume that it'll get better either and and this scenario one to me presumes that in two months or three months or before the end of the year that everything will go back to being fine and that's just not true it's going to take years to recover and and i i and i think your point it totally seems unrealistic to me
073to think scenario one we're gonna get what we want the outcomes that you're talking about out of scenario one knowing what our financial picture looks like right now that is disingenuous to me i don't think that we can that that we do we really think we wouldn't have to do some have some of the d sub bonds for our in the in the near future um looking at our current forecast that doesn't seem realistic to me at all well i think what needs to be laid out then moving forward is a clear painted picture of what the board wants to use the bonds for what are the expectations of the next three years that would support scenario two these are the these are the capital expenses which they must be used for these are items
074that we must do it's a safety issue we just we just have to do them and this is really why we need to go with scenario two and even though it's a 17 year savings that that that is my new however what what is the intent and the purpose of that of that buffer for and i i get it i understand it but just be very transparent yes there may be something if we go with scenario one that doesn't leave any room for any major building repairs expenses because it's not in the budget but what two to three years what would you realistically expect to do i mean that's that's just what i would like to see going forward knowing that um i don't know how many more bond votes i would be taking and
075going through assuming that this may be one of the last bond votes i would say scenario one saves the taxpayer the most amount of money it continues on our path there's more significant drops annually as as we move forward however if there are some dire needs that the district needs that we need to support we know in two years we're really going to need 1.3 million dollars for this project and there's no other way to get it then i need to know that before voting for scenario two that will be the case i mean we can provide you that information matt but that will be the case because that's the history of this district we don't have any money in in our budget for capital projects you have we have four different scenarios one provides
076and correct me if i'm wrong bob because i was looking at this the other day figuring this out too but i think the first scenario one is 14.2 million savings over the long haul correct say a scenario two is 13.6 million dollars over the long haul right and scenario three is 11 million savings over the long haul and scenario four is six million over the long haul correct when we issue debt service extension bonds uh which we will have to do um in scenario one what does that do to the tax the amount of taxes people are going to be currently does that not raise the amount of taxes people will currently be paying yeah so see the this green segment here you issue the non-referent bonds you put the green segment you know on
077top of each one of those blue bars if you went to the full d7 i mean you would you could do a choice only do half of it but it just means half the amount of proceeds this one um you know it'd be roughly split half of it would um be an increase half of it wouldn't and then on this one you would just be continuing this green bar on you know as far as many years as you you went out so scenario three actually uh allows the district to issue debt service extension bonds over the next few years correct and as well as save uh 11 11 11 million dollars over the long haul and for the taxpayer to pay less dollars over the next few years correct well over the long haul but
078if you if you issue the non-referendum bonds then this would stay rough there'd be a slight decrease but be roughly the same moving across so they wouldn't see if he did not refer to bonds an annual reduction in the bill which contrasts this these two where you would see an increase in the annual portion of the debt service bill okay i just wanted to make sure i was understanding all four scenarios correctly and i'm just gonna add in historically we have needed that amount the last five years and we still have capital projects that keep being put off because we still can't afford them even with that amount correct correct so over the last five years while we've had to pay back those d bonds we've also had to cut budget issues or we've also
079had to cut budget line items by even a more significant amount so it's we had about a 25 million dollar maintenance plan last i'd seen that we were unable to fund um we know that our buildings are just getting older and this is a concern because i don't know where the money's going to come from so to matt's point i think it would be a really good idea to take a look at what we're going to need and what the timeline looks like if we're going to need them next year if we're not going to need them for five or six years that looks different if we're going to need them next year that looks different too so what is the timeline that we need to make a decision on this for well the with
080the interest rates being at the low rate they're at or what your best guess is yeah well the the variable that was driving the the timeline was the uh the call date of the um this bond suit excuse me this bond series because you february 1st 21 so you back up 90 days from there that's when you can close and have a tax exempt sale so that takes you that means you can close right around november first which means you could sell around october 1st so we were gearing up that you potentially sell around october 1st so you would have if you want to stick with that date you would have through the month of september to make a decision but you know i think this decision you have to make right now is more
081important than trying to sell and close in that 90 day window if you need an extra month you need an extra month you just take another month of market risk but it's more important to make the right decision in my opinion because this is a relatively short financing because we're bringing debt and filling in that hole i don't you're not taking a whole lot of market risks and if you were doing like a 20-year financing i think we've had a lot of discussion have we had as much discussion as we're supposed to have on a topic yep well we've spent a lot more than 10 minutes on almost every topic but i do agree with you i'm just saying because i know we have a certain goal is that if you let me i'm not
082assuming you want to move on i've got 10 more minutes till 9 10. um christy are you do you think that that's feasible by our meeting in september to be able to get us that information well right because the dsab money is like 14 million we could definitely give you a list of what we could spend 14 million on yes yeah yeah that's that's not yeah that those are well timeout that means we're not getting any money no that's not what i want what we need we need yes i'm sorry i need it's not a luxury item list none of the things we're doing are luxury items by no means i would be real careful clarifying that is what we could spend money on it's meant to say need i apologize the budget as it
083is as a deficit to be looking for things to spend money on no we are not clear i think we have a list so we're clear does anyone else have anything they'd like christy to present as we look at this again at the next meeting no all right thank you very much and congratulations again thank you all right item 8.3 is an annual item at this time which is information on the levy christie yes and actually we're presenting this a little earlier this year in the event we have to issue uh tax anticipation warrants a little earlier this year due to the uh budget constraints we're working under so we're going to start with some of the terms you know already petal is the property tax limitation law that caps us at five percent or
084cpi whatever is lower caps us over the previous year's extension eav your equalized assessed valuation which is determined by the assessor the county assessors and should be one-third of your market value of your property levy is how much we're requesting which is what we're presenting tonight and then the extension is the total amount that a taxing body receives because we're presenting this a little earlier we do not have the preliminary numbers from the county so we're just estimating the numbers and these are only used for calculation purposes uh in these estimates i've listed the uh actual numbers from each county as well as the new property so the 2.133 billion includes the 18.2 billion i'm sorry million in new property so for my calculations here i've increased new property by five percent and existing property
085by two percent but again that's just for calculations and uh ruth had asked the question at the finance committee i'm estimating new property to be 19 million and you asked is the levy sufficient enough for all the growth that you're seeing and we the levy i'll be present or presenting tonight is can take on 55 million dollars worth of new property so i think we're going to be okay there so to calculate the extension you take last year's extension which was 103.1 million this is again just operating funds this has not the bound in interest fund multiplier or add cpi which we're using 2.3 percent that is the cpi we'll know uh very shortly what the cpi for next year will be and that brings our 2020 extension on existing property to 105.5 million dollars
086that number is then used to calculate the tax rate so you take that expected extension divide it by your eav so eav minus the new property and you get your tax rate for 2020 which is four pound 4.8485 that rate is then applied to the new property to get your new property extension which is about 930 dollars add that to your the extension on the existing property and our total extension expected for levy year 20 is 106.4 million dollars this is a chart you've seen before um your extension is the number you're trying to get to if your eav goes up your rate goes down if eav goes down your rate goes up and that is illustrated here you can see in 2013-14 that's the blue line is the eav that's when the housing market
087fell apart and the tax rate went way up and as the eav increased the tax rate is coming down and we're just about 4.8 percent last year also this is just another chart to kind of illustrate that 2019 our actual numbers 2.13 billion dollars in the av our limited rate last year or which is being collected this calendar year is 4.83 percent which gives us a total extension of 103.120. if eavs stayed stable this year and there was no new property but your existing property stayed as it is you can see your tax rate would go up to 4.98 to get to our new extension of 106.4 million dollars and that includes cpi if eav decreased by 10 i'm sorry if eav increased by 10 to 2.3 billion dollars your tax rate goes down but
088the total extension remains the same and on the flip side if it did decrease by 10 then your tax rate would go up to get to that 106.4 billion dollars this is what it would look like on a home for the average home homeowner this is assuming a property with a market value of three hundred thousand divide that by one-third to a hundred thousand homeowners exemptions senior exemptions all those are taken out after uh you do the division by a third so that's why we end up with uh a ninety four thousand dollar um stable eav on that house that tax bill then for this year would be uh four thousand six hundred and eighty nine dollars if that person's eav went up ten percent their tax bill would go up to 4716 and if
089their eav decreased by 10 percent their tax bill would go to 4 656 dollars uh these are some of the things you heard before as you know the base the extension this year is used as the base for the next year and going forward all the way down so the main takeaway here is that this year extension impacts all future years extensions every we know everything here except for eav and new property so those are the things we're making assumptions on but we do know what our extension would be on existing av eav again we're just calculating or estimating new property to get to our total extension which again we ask for more than what we think we're going to get just so we capture all that new property so here's the levy we're presenting
090which is 108.2 million dollars that keeps us at the four point nine nine percent so we would not need a truth and taxation uh hearing because we're under the five percent as by law but we expect to get about a 106.4 million dollars so we're asking for 108 but the county again will only give us what were the statutory limits are which is cpi or five percent whichever is lower which in this case cpi is lower and i've concluded if you wanted to research some more information on property taxes you can go to any of the county's websites questions do we do we have an option to not levy for the increase in cpi you yes you always have that option do we really though no do we really know i mean that would make
091our deficit and the budget even more in fact it would make it the next steps are um in 20 days 20 days from today whatever board meeting that would be following that 20 days we'll bring it back for um a vote to adopt the levy and then we'll file the three the levees with each of the three counties any questions all right that's our last informational item all right item 9.1 at 909. i make a motion to adjourn