March 31, 2022 // MSD Wabash County School Board Meeting

001of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for like to all everyone back out this week future board meetings june 14th and 28th and july 12th all at six o'clock here at the administration building we're going to run things a little differently tonight than what a normal meeting we covered most of that the last meeting on all of our public recognition and things like that so we're just going to jump into why we're here so the next this uh under unfinished business uh the item on the agenda is for the board to hold a project and preliminary hearing on the on this proposed project if you are interested in speaking at the time of the hearing please make sure you

002have signed into the sign-in sheet which should include your name and address after a presentation by the administration and its advisors there will be an opportunity for the public to make comments about the project at the hearing we will ask each person to commit their comments to about three minutes or so and that the topic be limited to the proposed project under consideration at the notice of display preliminary determination hearing was published as legally required on may 24th 2022 in the wabash plain dealer at this time i will ask mr key favorite to explain the purpose of this hearing proceed to the indiana code 20-26-7-37 before a school corporation may spend more than a million dollars to build repair or alter a school building that will be financed by a lease or bonds it must

003hold a public hearing in which explanations of the potential value of the project to the school corporation community are given similarly as per indiana code 6-1.1-20-3.5 a school corporation must hold two public hearings and adopt a resolution to preliminarily determine to issue bonds or enter a lease for a project which has a total project cost in excess of a non-controlled project these public hearings and the adoption of the resolutions are the very beginning of the legal process these resolutions are under consideration this evening to establish the maximum financial terms for the proposed project thank you we will now hear from mr key favor and others about the process of determining and communicating the project to the community and the need for the project the history and process to this point how and how the proposed

004project meets the needs as previously described thank you mr daisy so as you recall and probably heard it many many times our logo is dream big work hard so this slide presentation includes additional information from the questions and or comments from the meeting from last tuesday relating to the proposed project just want to go over quickly here the priorities of our district strategic plan of that plan and we'll give you the dates later but of course priority one will student achievement develop and enhance quality programs to improve student achievement priority number two recruitment and retention attract and retain students to increase enrollment priority number three financial insurer find fiscal responsibility and stability and priority number four facilities and technology provides safe and efficient learning environments and priority number four we call it strategic plan number

005four and that actually is one that we've been uh discussing quite a bit so there are actually a lot of details underneath the strategic plan number four but the objective is the one that we're really considering and that is the objective number 4.1 optimize utilization and determine feasibility of current facilities or other possibilities so communication and this is what mr daisy was reading about how did we get to this point so the community communication so in 2019 this started uh with having a strategic plan a session and that was a work session work sessions are open to the public and that was on april 17 2019. seems like a long time ago was pre-coded and then december 3rd through the 19th we had presentations to all of our building level staff we went to the

006schools and then starting in 2020 and if you recall 2020 march 13th was that big day of cova but right before that we actually had uh public strategic plan presentations of course we didn't know anything about code at that time but we had one at northfield for the community and then we had one southwood for the community also we continued on and you can see it was a little bit later a lot of things changed from march 13th we shut down different things happened but we started working back into the plan and so september 22nd you can see that we had a strategic plan uh work session again we reviewed it and updated it and then october the school board meeting we have policy analytics come and talk to us about and do a actual

007presentation on assess value and also tax rates and then in november another school board work session reviewed the strategic plan with our architect mark and co villama so moving forward to 2021 school board work session uh reviewed barton co-villema information i did a swot analysis we'll share some of that here in a little bit and also the board took the tour of the buildings and that was part of the strategic plan also then september 28th um another work session uh updating number four and at the school board meeting it was a recommendation to approve the resolution authorizing appraisals of real estate and then get a little closer to current uh of april 12th of 2022 we had ice miller bond council um talk to us about the controlled project process and referendum presentation mr eric

008long is with us today but when he came on april 12th that was um virtual so he was on the big screens now he's here in in person so welcome to mr eric bond and then school board meeting also the recommendation to approve the resolution authorizing negotiation and execution of purchase agreement which was done then and so on may 10th of 2022 another uh school board work session update from architect firm and they are martin covillino and then of course just last tuesday was a school board meeting and that was the first preliminary determination hearing so i'm running two screens right now so where we came from i love this slide um because it has a lot of our history so um it's actually on the other wall here you can see all of our

009board members you can see um that embassy of walrus county board of education in 1959 we became a school corporation that was july 1 of 1959 if you recall back in 1959 uh there were nine different township schools and you can see those people that were involved with that back then i wonder confirming points all right so the history of uh msd of wabash county msd of course was founded 62 years ago from multiple township schools and you can see there 1959 of course 1962 and then four elementary schools were built then from 1965 to 1980. be interested to know how many people went to some of those township schools here too so how many people went to township schools here don't ask them their ages i know some of these people they get upset

010if i did that okay where we are today so we have two preschool programs one at metro north elementary the little north of course and southwood elementary little knights the three elementaries metro north elementary shore creek elementary at southwood elementary and of course two of our traditional junior senior high schools northfield junior senior high school and southwest junior senior high school our non-traditional school white's junior senior high school we also have a bridge program that's an online credit recovery program and that's run through white student senior high school and then we do have a collaboration with four other school districts on the other two slides there of wabash miami area program and also heartland career center so the swot analysis that we talked about our strengths and we could probably add a lot more to

011this but these are just a few assessed valuation is one of our strengths retiring debts last payment of 2023 cash balances and the rainy day fund circuit breaker losses are minimal and student transfers from out of district those are all strengths the opportunities then low tax rate below the median managed tax rate developed debt plan expand out of district transfers and creation of long-range planning some of the weaknesses student capacity in buildings two high school buildings double services 18 buildings facility updates long range facility plan black debt plan and then threats is declining enrollment state legislation funding open enrollment also resistance to facility needs upgrades additional required programming and unexpected growing and growing cost of course code has been one of those examples so what is the challenge a lot of you have seen this

012before but that projected population decline this graph was provided to us by grilled walnut county and you can actually see then from the census from 2010 to 2020 we lost 1912 residents in wabash county in just those 10 years now you think about 1912 that may not seem like a lot in a large metropolitan area maybe in marion county but for walmart county that's a large percentage kind of take a mental picture of that graph and you can see like around 1980 to mid 80 to mid 80s the population of course of wave counting was at the peak and then if you kind of look at our own student enrollment it's a little harder to understand or look at it exactly as far as the same comparison because some of the ranges that we have

013are some of the dates that we have of northfield and southwood of just nine through 12 we don't have all of the data but we give you a little bit of comparison so 1976 to 1977 that sounds hard to say those 1976 1977 the population of the two high schools combined in 980. you can see then it goes down there through 1981 1982 there's a big space there where we don't have some data and then you can start looking at some of our present day classes and actually then if you go all the way down to the last one 2020 2021 is 509 and actually it's not on this graph or on this chart but it's actually 509 again so you do have 509 compared to the 1980 that we had in the same buildings

0141976-1977 so student opportunities mr drake is going to share the next two slides hello settle down um relax it'll be a little bit of a conversation yeah let's my name is tim drake i'm chief academic officer and so when we talk about student opportunities um i'll tend to focus more on the academic side but that isn't to shortchange the athletic or even the extracurricular side we're raising whole children not children just to do to take a standardized test or just to do whatever and go to college and so we'll have that big picture in mind but for the next few minutes i'm going to walk down the academic side of it uh i have the last couple years not an audit for our program just to check and see how we're doing as we lose

015students and as we lose programming everybody just kind of makes assumptions and so rather than just go with those assumptions i went and actually printed out course lists and so i compared our school offerings with other schools our size uh that's roughly a two-way school about 100 kids per class i didn't do some of the bigger schools i didn't do a lot of the smaller schools i just found something that i felt like our community was used to offering students uh and i found um and i have the notes i don't want to put them up here for for a couple of reasons but i have a notes i'm more than willing to meet with anybody to share the specifics about it when it comes to our dual credit and our ap offerings there's always

016one student in the class we are we are at par if not above what other schools our size offer our pathways again are very much on par with what other schools offer uh if there was one area where i would kind of poke and hope that we could do better it would be in the area of fine arts we don't have a lot in our music and our drama departments mostly because of sizes of choir and sizes of vans so that does present a challenge and so that would be one area i feel like as a district we need to keep trying to be better at and we do i don't think we just accept it but but i think that the audit would show that we are a little bit lacking in that area

017um on that note um before i get to my specific examples of uh to help you kind of see the programming issues um i took the liberty also trying to pinpoint our size of school that we felt comfortable with people come to wabash county for lots of different reasons i can tell you i'm a marion giant i didn't get any flipped birds or anything bad i appreciate that i absolutely loved it and if you would have asked me a marion if i would have ended up at a small school i'd have said not a chance i thrived in that i enjoyed the atmosphere my wife did not and her family the coopers and pilgrims they loved this area and so before i met her though i went to teach at whites and when i interviewed

018to teach at whites luke curless was a principal there some of you guys might know the first name when i went in the interview i literally said to them in an interview i understand if you don't hire me i'm only going to be here here another year or two and i'm going to move on that's what i said uh they took a gamble and hired me and here i am this is my 25th year that i just finished here in the district uh because it grows on you right uh the small school town feel and so um i figure we're roughly a two-way school all of us have our different preferences but i think if you look historically we're about 100 kids per class just so you have a frame of reference which so many

019people don't have anymore northfield high school this year for classification for ihsa for next year has 275 high school students that puts them in a 1a school southwood has 240 that puts them at a 1a score wabash oh sorry if you were to combine the two of them they would be 500 a high school of 515 which would make them in next year's classification a 3a school they would be 3a by 20 students wabash this year using ihsa numbers will be a two-way school because it has 471 high school students so if you were to combine wabash with northfield and southwood you would have a high school of 986 using ihsa numbers which would put them 39 students away from being a 4a school and so i didn't target a 4-day school in my programming

020because i felt like our community is used to a two-way smaller school field and so all of my audit was based on that all right now to my examples so i came up with two scenarios to help you see what happens as our class sizes get smaller and how that really impacts their offer so i created a fictional person bobby bobby's been a senior who's been in band for forever he goes to heartland we love sending kids to heartland as a matter of fact we send an overwhelming group of kids to ireland both north and south you'll find also that very few of our seniors are in the building full day anymore most of them are either at an internship at a college campus or at heartland and we try hard to drive kids to

021heart women so those of you from the older days were saying we used to not send kids to heartland because of this that and the other uh that isn't the case you should sit and talk to roger dean and nicole michael and they'll tell you we try to get kids there so bobby uh you can see his schedule he's gonna go to heartland heartland's a three hour commitment and so he'll go there either all morning or all afternoon so in our case we put him there all afternoon and he has to take english and he has to take governor nikon so that gives him one period it's not uncommon for a senior to have a study hall but bobby wants to do band and he likes to do cad um several kids have recently graduated

022from msd and now the architecture school of ball state which is a highly competitive some of them are even going on a master's working so our cap program is very good but bobby now has a choice and he won't be able to take them both because they won't fit in schedule getting more kids won't alleviate all problems bobbies all have to make decisions homestead high school carmel high school they don't get to take everything so this isn't a silver bullet i'm not saying adding more kids together will solve it i think it will get us to where we're used to to a school giving kids the programming opportunities that they're used to having parents feel like they're going to give their kids that kind of service and so bob is going to have to make

023that choice because we don't have enough band sections we don't have cad sections to make that work another example if you go to the next line um advanced placement and dual credit so you can see here those are the actual numbers from this year northfield junior 65 senior 63 southwood juniors 59 seniors 48 just that little drop in numbers of students is going to result in a significant lowering of ap classes and dual credits and so as i say here as a chief academic officer what i see is we have a large group of students chasing ap and dual credit classes but what i notice is at one school they're able to access a lot more of them than they are at another school and so we explore options some of our students take classes

024online some of our teachers drive half day one at one building and a half day in another building and what we find is those are not as effective as having a student in the building or a teacher in the building all day we've explored those uh mr key favor replied earlier to uh march 13th when we went to covent cove would forced us all in march april may to do our best with virtual instruction and it was kind of put a band-aid on it and survived that fall the board decided that we were going to try to get started in the building some parents didn't feel comfortable sending their students to the building so we hired our own teachers we gave them an extra stipend to teach our own students after that at the end

025of the semester every one of my teachers quit every one of them teachers quit and it isn't because they don't have a heart for kids as a matter of fact i would say they quit because they have a heart for kids they realize that without the relationship of that that they weren't they weren't being as successful as they wanted to be parents most of the parents dropped out of it as well same reason they knew their kids weren't getting the education they wanted and so i would suggest the chief admin officer that our strategy to solve this problem is not through half day teachers driving back and forth nor is it through virtual instruction it's through having a teacher for the building building relationships being with students the number one response on surveys why people

026pulled out a virtual program the number one response was lack of relationships and so as we talked about in enrollment decreasing this is what we see right we offer everything under the summit wabash the north are sorry southwood and norfolk will offer everything they want everything you want can you get it in a kid's schedule that's the challenge because we can't offer multiple sections to free up the schedule so a student can take one thing that they like and another thing like that like and so so i feel like part of our response to this plan is to try to get a larger critical mass i like to look at mr bowman because that's his phrase a large critical mass so that our students can get the kind of programming that we expect to offer

027in our kind of community thank you all right thank you dr koon is going to do the next three slides yeah i don't have much of a solid storyline but i'm chris cannon superintendent finance and operations similar background is mr drake even went to a larger high school worked at westfield for eight years which is an extremely large high school came back to got a job in wabash at southwood actually was open to use it as a stepping stone to get back to westfield uh but really fell in love with the community and the opportunities that it allowed for my family not only my family but myself to grow in my experiences so that's what brought me here uh for that now part of this issue is probably my fault because i focus on facilities

028and operational sides from a day-to-day standpoint and looking at some of the issues that we're running into and needs that we're running into with some of our facilities and how we operate it made sense to kind of look at how some of those things how we could evolve some of those things into fixing other issues that we may have such as enrollment with academic programs and so forth so part of our solution also relates to buildings and so forth so i just gave this at the last meeting it's just a snapshot it's a 30 000 foot view of kind of the the overall cost that we have for specific buildings um those numbers may not mean a whole lot i broke out one of those contain salary benefits because obviously we have individuals that are

029employed at those building levels and then then you throw into other costs such as maintenance costs utility costs other things that might be building level costs but we also have things that are district level costs that are there because of the buildings that aren't necessarily separated by buildings one example of that would be our insurance for example we spend close to 250 000 in property insurance well it's not tied to a specific building they don't bill us metro north is this much in insurance a district-wide bill so some of that stuff still has to be separated out into the buildings and so that's where you get the b is the building level cost and the d is the district level cost so if you go to the next slide i took some of that information

030and broke it down a little bit just to get a better sense of some of the things that we're talking about there and the things that i looked at here were maintenance costs and utility costs just pick out a couple examples and base that off of the square footage of the building and student enrollment in the building because on the last slide we saw that our buildings aren't really at full capacity when it comes to the size that they can actually hold as far as students are concerned so if you go to the next one this just kind of same numbers it just makes the graph or the chart a little bit smaller to see but you can look at a few things there and i'm not here to kind of pinpoint necessarily everything uh

031but you can look at for example utility costs okay if we look at all of our buildings and we look at the cost per square foot as an example you can see shark creek cost our corporation the most square foot when it comes to utility costs maintenance costs you can see that northfield and southwood have higher maintenance costs which you kind of would think that they would because they have larger buildings but when you look at it from a student enrollment standpoint it's significantly higher and mainly because those buildings don't have the number of students that they need to have in there to really justify some of those costs overall and so not going to go like i said i'm not going to go into detail in every little bit of thing there but something

032to kind of look at and pay attention to when we're talking about efficiencies uh and how our buildings are being used and what they're being used for thank you so what is the solution the same slide as last week build a new high school grades 9-12 currently at northfield and southwestern combined into one new high school the current norfolk and southwest junior senior high buildings would transition into buildings for preschool through 8th grade this would transition to msdwc traditional schools from five buildings into three buildings so student opportunities so maintain and enhance academic offerings consistent course scheduling uh mr drake talked about that a little bit and then doctor truman talked about maintaining enhance i'm sorry maintain and enhance extracurricular offerings uh mr drake also mentioned that a little bit so depending on the interest

033of our students maintaining and enhancing academic and extracurricular offerings including the arts can be accomplished and so that's one example if we go to the next slide efficiency and staffing will result in increased opportunities and then utility and maintenance costs we'll talk about that a little bit more first of all let me get all my notes to work so what are the increased opportunities so give you a little example um english for example that might not be the best example but for english the indiana state approved course titles and descriptions is a 400 page document it's a pdf 400 page document so we know that teachers and students have different interests and so we also know that that you can look at what they can take for example english 9 for example is pretty much

034what all of our english 9 students take but there are a lot of different pages i talked about um on that document as far as different uh ideas that you could have so i'm still trying to look at this here mr drake i should have used that as far as running the powerpoint doing all that so another thing is that transfers right now when we talk about efficiencies and staffing results increase opportunities right now we actually take and dr can you explain this a little bit more but we take approximately 13 of our education fund to transfer to the operation fund and the reason for that is when the state of indiana in 2019 changed it to the different funds just the education and operations fund because of putting certain people out of the education

035fund and putting them into the operations fund the state were put up there earlier you do know that those savings of those efficiencies we would not have to transfer as much money and so those funds then can be used for more opportunities for for our staff also some referendums there's two different types of referendums we have the experts here maybe they can correct me if i'm wrong but we have a construction one which we're talking about tonight but and also the project but we also have an operations an operations referendum is basically for operations so for example to increase possible benefits and salaries of of staff and so in this model of being more efficient it would be an indirect result of being able to provide more of those opportunities so in other words you

036would not have to have an extra referendum like an operational referendum so those are just a couple examples also we do know that um of our eight um districts that surround us we are the only ones that have the two high schools and so we actually spend more money and more budget and money towards athletics for coaches because we duplicate everything and so here again that would be another opportunity to be more on par with other schools as far as that goes because right now even though we do spend more money than anybody around us it's because that we double everything up and so that makes a difference also just another indirect result of a plan like this would help a lot so again a lot of this goes along with our strategic plan that

037we'll talk about a little bit more about attracting and retaining students and also staff so possible timeline of the project this has not changed from what we talked about last tuesday so of course when the referendum passes november 8th then we move on to the period where um you can see uh from the architectural drawings would happen also bids and then the estimated time through our through those people would be the groundbreaking of march of 2024. and then they said approximately three years to build high school so that would be an august 2027 start and then of course so the first students would be actually and then we haven't talked about this a lot but uh and then transition to the three schools possibly another one one probably two maybe even three years but possibly

038the transition to three school corporation would be 20 29 20 30. so there were some questions last time that we had a few of our slides and that's why now so the why now first of all the real estate opportunity that we have also low interest rates also building costs will continue to rise retiring staff and retired debts and so to go over that a little bit more we'll talk about some of this first of all the real estate will allow for additional opportunities in the future we are also working with a design engineer and they continue to project increased building and label labor costs i don't think anybody would not realize that right now i re retired debt this allows for a larger project potential right now of course you saw that earlier that

039the uh reduced bonds and that debt is in 2023. there's some other explanations here we'll go over so one sometimes we talked about tax rate this is the tax rate for 2022 right now people sometimes wonder about our own tax rate so right now 2022 you can see on the far left msd we are the lowest and we typically um compare we typically compare our eight districts that we've ordered okay so we do order all these and so you can just see down the line eastbrook manchester north miami huntington mechanical jump up to peru a dollar thirty two o killed a dollar fifty and while the city of dollar fifty three so of those districts that we um order we are the lowest at this point and you have to also recall uh remember that

040we are the lowest of the 25th percentile in the state of indiana those 294 corporations so that's where we're right now so why now that is one of the reasons also historical interest rates uh we did not find a chart that goes all the way back into the 70s but anybody that bought a home in the 70s or bought anything in the 70s you're talking about 14 15 16 interest rates i know my wife and i when we purchased our home in 1989 it was 10.875 this is this is more for bonding but yet you can see that we are still in the historical low interest rate era although you can see that there is starting to be a spike so when we go back to why now that is another why now so another

041question was what have we looked at before this question was brought up and so this was part of our strategic plan that we looked back and we actually had this slide and i think has been posted a lot of different places but this slide back in september to retain all schools maintain and improve all five school buildings and adjust grade levels as needed shuffling grade levels shuffling grade levels as needed to phase out to four to three buildings over time give specific focus on 9 through 12 while maintaining and improving certain buildings and of course build a new high school build a k through our 9 through 12 high school to include phasing into a 3 building district over time while maintaining and improving certain buildings and so going along with those three what if

042the referendum does not pass so if the referendum fails i know you can read them on read us out loud msdwc will continue to aim at providing the best education for our students looking back at our strategic plan options for the future will include borrowing more money to improve our aging buildings and or reconfigure the current buildings and upgrading them to accommodate one high school so i want to thank laura lange bartles and our team who actually have different ideas and then she ate people to create this it makes it very visually pleasing when we look at this when we when we compare looking at our strategic plan of those four goals and also um what the different options were so retaining those schools really do not meet any of the strategic planning shuffling grade

043levels okay student achievement that allows more opportunities there so that's what we talked about facilities and technology provides some efficiency not all efficiency but then of course a new high school it goes along with all four of our strategic plans student achievement recruitment retention financial your facilities and technology so strategic plan number four is what we've been highlighting but they're all very important additional opportunities for students facility improvements maintenance and upgrades and building use efficiencies so 62 years after the creation of msdwc see those filament up there in the top left-hand corner we want to propel msd of lawyers county for the next 60 plus years so daisy that goes along with some of the things that you've asked me to provide tonight well now we will now hear from jim elizondo our underwriter about

044how the proposed project will be financed as well as information about the effect on the typical property taxpayer good evening good evening thanks i would like to take and take us through the next steps of it viewed it as a board and a community site proceed with a project and go through the referendum process what does the size of the project look like how do we propose restructuring and paying the debt and then what does that mean to you as taxpayers uh start with a few assumptions the first bullets just are a reminder that we do have nine different taxi districts so we have a wide variety of taxpayer bills out there the township only unincorporated areas your tax bill will have a county tax a school tax a township tax on it the when

045you move to the incorporated areas the city portions you then add a city tax on there as well as there may be other little pieces but everybody's tax bill's different so really that assumption is truly just to show that you have a very diverse taxing body next we want to look at the assessed values as we project forward estimated tax impacts and rates we have to base those on some assessed value assumptions so historically over the last 10 years you've grown at about 1.9 per year in 2022 you grew at 5.4 so um we then uh look at what do we project forward you have uh employed policy analytics to do some assessed value projections and review and i know in your timeline of prior meetings they have presented to you but we're actually using

046their assumptions going forward and that averages about 3.6 per year however their assumptions are very detailed and that there will be years it bounces around so we're following exactly what they laid out as their assumption in our numbers and finally market interest rates i'm using about one and a half percent over the market your graph that you looked at there has that spike that we saw just recently since i was here this is not so just remember we're going to look at conservative interest rates but in the last week we've seen a 50 a 50 basis point chain drop in injury in municipal interest rates now part of that is we've been on an inflation fear now the re recession fears are pushing and our market is volatile as it is 50 basis points in

047a week is shows you how volatile our market currently is but you know all of a sudden now my assumptions are closer to two percent over the market today but that's not to say a week from now you know the markets look at it differently but that's just to reiterate that historically we are at uh still low interest rates in the taxes that market but we are trying to be conservative in that estimate because tonight after this hearing you will be asked to consider a resolution if you decide to proceed that will set maximums and we want those to be conservative and worst case numbers next one uh the estimate for the projects would be approximately 115 million dollar bond issue of which after you take in the cost of going to the bond markets

048um we would just say that would generate roughly 113 million 445 000 and that's a again numbers that are in your resolute resolutions they are estimates though there are two other items that will fit into your budget one is capitalized interest capitalized interest is something we put in the budget and in your case it's to smooth the tax is the flexibility to smooth the tax rate in that first year if we don't need it that comes out and can be used to either reduce the borrowing or increase the size of the heart and soft costs of construction and then finally the last piece is about a million two million one million one hundred one million one hundred and seventy thousand uh is cost of issues cost of issuance are truly all the costs involved in

049going to the bond markets that's underwriting the bonds rating agency reviews attorneys fees title insurance uh survey costs appraisal costs all the things that are involved in the bond issue but that gets us to our total of 115 million and we want to share with you an estimated budget of where that money would go next uh this is a representation of your existing debt service tax rate if you recall or have looked at your tax bills you have two tax-based funds one is the operation fund or is the debt service fund we are looking directly here at the debt service fund because the debt service fund is the fund that you would utilize to pay bonds and debt service and you'll see as has been mentioned that the all of your long-term debt does pay

050off here fairly soon you'll see the green line um when we started this process in 2019 and then into 2020 we were looking at a historic rate in the debt service fund of right around 29 cents per hundred dollars of assessed value and that's what i've highlighted uh for those four years with the green line in 2022 you had a strong 5.4 assessed value growth which drove down your tax rate because you had your level debts uh payments but the tax rate forced that or the assessed value force that rate down and then we're still projecting in 23 because you're starting this process you're not going to be ready to have new debt in 23 even if you react where to act tonight we are projecting that with current estimates of assessed value growth that

051that debt service rate could drop even further then if we go to the next slide this is what we would propose a 115 million dollar bond issue would look like in your debt service fund that would shoot horn in right after your other debt is paid off if we go to the next slide we estimate that that is an increase of a little over 54 cents per hundred dollars of assessed value over what you historically were paying 18 in 2018 through 21. and the reason again we're going back to where this whole process process started and where ignoring the av growth where tax bills have kind of settled in for multiple years we go to the next slide there are a couple things the next two slides will lay out some of the maximums that

052you will be asked as a board to consider tonight and the first one is you would be setting a maximum lease payment the maximum lease payment would be based on this project on its own has nothing to do with existing debt it would be the maximum payment that could be generated and we're showing that at 10 million four hundred thousand dollars per year and that it if you do decide to proceed that can never be exceeded it can always be reduced but it can't be exceeded and then based on that the tax impact um now my eyes are going crazy it's 83 cents um there it is now i can see um yeah is 83 cents per hundred dollars of assessed value so if we take the assessed values and put that maximum lease payment

053in there we get an estimate of an 83 total increase for the project but a difference from your current tax bill of about the 54 cents next item are some items that are required uh from the legislature to be in all resolutions for projects of this size first is your current debt service levy uh that's at 1 million 947 000 and that is your 2022 so that's on the books in your existing budget uh the debt service tax rate is at 25.6 cents per hundred dollars of assessed value we would also be sending a maximum term of your lease that would be 22 years however in indiana you can only borrow up to 20 years on school financings so the extra two years are built in to allow flexibility if there were a delay um

054any of those things so we don't have to start the process over so that's part of the legal councils always lets us go out to about 22 years as a maximum realizing that we can only sell for 20 years so your debt will never be over 20 years but that lease payment has to fit within that uh we do have to estimate our total interest um that's 71 million again very conservative like i said we're up to get to an even number so it's a pretty conservative number there and then finally there are two ratios that are required and these are ratios that some legislator wanted to see and wanted everybody to show but they actually do have some reference in that bond buyers will look at these ratios as they evaluate what interest rate

055they think they should be getting if they buy your bonds first one is debt service to net assessed value that is really your total debt service including the projection for the new bonds divided by your current assessed value so that's about 1.3 that puts you in the low range uh not quite to the moderate but low range not extremely low but still very comfortable that uh to a bond buyer it is a non-event they would not tickle their fancy at all or concern them about what kind of rate bump they might need and then finally the last ratio is considering your debt all overlapping and underlying debt so we look at how much debt is outstanding currently and then we look at the county debt the township that the school corporations or the um city

056debts etc and we allocate a share of those debts to this number so in the case of a township that townships that would be 100 out allocable to you because that whole township is part of your taxing district for the city of wabash we would look at what portion of yours is the city so that would be a smaller portion of that that's allocable so in that case we come up with about three point three eight percent uh per uh the net assessed value and that fits into the moderate range the low end of the moderate range again the market of indiana bonds that would not be a concern to anyone and the rating agencies but i just want to share those numbers because they will be in your resolution your resolution also will have

057a table showing the estimated tax rates and levels for the next 10 years again the graph represents that but that will that will be in your resolution as part of the table now what does that incremental tax rate increase mean to you as taxpayers again you'll see across the top the nine taxing districts they vary from townships to cities and towns et cetera and you'll notice that this first slide i'm taking the median home value in each of those districts now oh yeah you can zoom that up a little bit might help others as well as me if i could see that one better there we go it went again it's real light the figures are right but i'll highlight a couple here so if we go to the grow township over there the top

058number it shows the median home value in the grow that's 149 what we do then is take that home and take away that would be the gross assessment we then take away your homestead exemption your supplemental exemption if you have a mortgage exemption i don't take anything into account for veterans or 65 over 65 exemptions but if you have those that would impact that so then uh the estimate of that incremental tax increase would be approximately 351 dollars per year or about 29 per month if you go to legrow just in the town you'll see that a very different number in that the average or the median home value is 45 400 with about 48 dollars per year or four dollars per month that whole table goes and just takes that meaning now all of

059us if any of us hit this table exactly right you're done and you know your number but um it's not going to be the case so i also then on the next slide add a hundred thousand dollar home and what's interesting here and when you go through a referendum all taxpayers no matter what circuit breaker caps are in place if you go through a referendum a referendum bond is outside or exempt from circuit break so if you have 65 or veterans credits those are all credits that come out before you get to the av calculations so those are maintained but once you go through a referendum all taxpayers pay share equally per assessed value and so that's what this example shows that if we assume a hundred thousand dollar home you'll see that every taxing

060district if you have a hundred thousand dollar home there you'll be paying roughly 177 dollars per year more or about 15 per month there will be a tax calculator if you do decide to go through the referendum process and proceed there will be an online tax calculator set up at the state as well as we can have something set up on your web page where you can then go in and put your specific information and look just at your property and then finally the last uh the next slide we looked at farmland now any of you that are farmers know that farmland is not an easy calculation for the state boy that every acre has different production values even within the same acre you utilize a base assessed value from the state and also farm

061a lot of farms also have homesteads on them other out buildings etc but for this slide i'm looking at a hundred thousand dollar of 100 tillable land all at the base production factor of one so in effect i don't know that that property is in your county either as i've described it but again it shows that that hundred thousand dollar farmland roughly 542 dollars per year or 45 dollars per month the tax calculator is the only way u.s farmers are going to bail to get a really consolidated estimate of what your tax impact will be uh there is one more slide that if you happen to have your tax bill in hand you can take the net assessed value divided by 100 and multiply it times the 54.17 cents per uh estimated incremental increase and

062that would give you that's the calculation i've used in all of those numbers but the problem is give me that net excess value um you know it's it's easy to have the cash bill or you can go online in the county and look up your asses that assess value and use that to do that so at that point um that's all i have uh i have a couple of questions just maybe so jim can clarify for us so you mentioned for this project the estimate cost is 115 million that's what we're proposing however we we will not borrow any type of monies until we've actually gone through a bidding process and so if that bidding process comes back and it's only a hundred million dollars then we wouldn't be borrowing 115. the way the process

063is set up that the the ultimate bids and you're borrowing dictates the lease payment so i told you the maximum lease payment to the extent you only borrow 100 million under that example we would pay and we would also know our real market interest rates so the combination of the market interest rates and the lower borrowing we would then reduce those lease payments across the board and the way the lease is written is we are required to reduce the lease down to the actual debt service on the bonds plus a slight rounding so yes we would that would be an opportunity to prepare everything back down and reduce the total cost and tax it back so at that point those changes will be updated would be the changes would be reflected in the online calculator

064well if you if yeah yes we could definitely do that if you've already if you have that before the referendum we compare that back if you if you've already done the referendum we would keep the calculator we could readjust it and your community could always have that access to the extent you were to pair this project back uh before you know sometimes i get what you mean if we go to referendum before we know those exact numbers we can't then it's not going to change right or if at any point if the board decides well we've got new information and 112 is our is the magic number we can then modify at that point but we are setting a maximum but we can always pair back and we can always go back until the moment

065we sell bonds right once we sell bonds then you're locking into a fixed repayment that we would keep can you go to slide nine from the first step okay so i just want to make sure that i'm clear on this and everybody else is clear on this uh just talking to a couple patrons and they saw something on facebook and so it's hard to believe that something on facebook is not 100 accurate um that it looks like just because it looks like our debt since it raises to 83 cents and it was only 29 cents from a historical perspective that our taxes are automatically going to multiply by three times so if i'm paying 700 then i'm automatically going to be paying 2100 can you explain that a little bit and i will share that

066chris asked me this question so i did prepare a slide to help me get there in case he chose to do that tonight but the idea is let's stay on that slide for a second you remember i mentioned that in the school fund or the school's tax rate you have the operations fund and the debt service tax rate this is only the net service tax rate so that part of the question is that we're only looking at part of your school tax rate so when we add two then that will change the numbers but if we can go to the very back of my presentation uh the first slide past that and that you're going to have to zoom out yes and you can actually go to the top half if you weren't able to

067zoom even more to that net of excess value so this is a tax bill from so the portion of the school district in the city we started with their median home about median home value of 142 300. that is the gross assessed value as you know the hope of the legislature was that that would match your market value none of them are exactly at market value but that's in a set in in essence what we're looking at is we're trying to look at 142 000 home i'm going to kind of just work through the tax bill these are the components of a tax bill and i think it will help answer your question so first we take away the deductions that are available first is a homestead standard deduction everybody gets to 45 000. the

068supplemental deduction is 35 of the remaining remainder of that balance in this case that's 34 000. we're assuming this homeowner has a mortgage so they get a 3 000 deduction if they were 65 and over a disabled veteran or a partially disabled veteran there would be additional credits that would show up there and those are tied to in effect uh the property tax caps but it's not in the cap it's the credit is the way those are issued i'm assuming none of those because they are only making it harder for me to explain so uh if we go to the net assessed value that forty two thousand three hundred dollar home has a net assessed value of sixty thousand two hundred forty five dollars that is the net assessed value that we're going to put

069toward that calculation i showed you on my last on that last screen where we take the 54 cents times the net assessed value divided by 100. so that's what's happening in the background then we look and the tax rates this is really where i think we start to get to chris's question of the total 3.60 tax rate that that's taxpayers paid 41 cents of it it's coming from the county 1.7 from the township two dollars and eleven cents from the school or from the county or the city point eight seven from the school and one point eight from the library that makes up that three dollars and sixty cents of that you'll see that the school makes up on the far right about six uh oh no less i'm not confused let's stay on the

070left column so we calculated gross tax the way we calculated gross taxes we take that tax rate times that six the net assessed value that says the gross tax is 2173 however we have tax caps the circuit breaker tax caps are one percent of the gross assessed battle and if you remember that was that 142 000 number that that gives us a tax cap for this taxpayer of 1423. the tax bill can't be higher than that in the current situation unless you have exact debt and under this scenario there is no other exempt debt for this taxpayer that means there's a savings of about 750 dollars due to the tax cap and if we move down you'll see that the non-exempt tax rate tax bill is 1 423 and that's due to tax caps the

071actual bill that is out there is but tax caps cap that taxpayer at the 1400 level the next column over and you can stay right there we don't need to go above because the assumptions above um next tax bill is what if we add the incremental increase from the referendum that's that 54 cents that you see on the school rate i assume all the other tax rates stay right where they are we add the 54 cents taking the school rate up to a dollar 41.94 that's about a 61 increase so right off the bat we don't have the tripling because we're sharing among two rates but then as we compare it with the total rate that's about a 15 increase in rate for that entire tax bill so you see as that incremental increase as

072we share with the broader tax base causes our percentage increase to not be as dramatic we come down to the bottom and you'll see that because of tax caps the tax bill actually increases about 22 percent um that's that 326 dollars that showed on the prior slides but that's a that's purely a function of the tax cap has has taken a percentage of that out and changes the does that help a little bit with the one idea i've also done the same thing for a smaller the smallest tax bill which throws those percentages slightly different but it does do the same thing if you'd like me to go through that or if that helped answer your question that it is that would help answer my question i just wanted to make it clear that even

073though that debt rate looks like it's tripling it's not tripling the tax bill exactly and that's the component of euro that's only one little one component of your entire tax bill other questions all right we'll now open the public hearing remember if you would like to speak please have signed in on the sheet that was out front we'll get that here in a second start going through those if your name did not get on that list we'll give you a second here to get you or if you've changed your mind if you said no and you would like to say something um while he's getting that i would like to just say that as i mentioned earlier we ask that you state your name and address and limit your comments to the proposed project and

074financing being considered and keep your comments about three minutes or so so we can avoid being competitive so the first person i have signed in and somebody would like to speak is gary johnson hi [Music] um my name is gary johnson and i live at 4503 east hanging rock road in the grove um i guess i just wanted to take a minute tonight and thank all of you gentlemen that are sitting in front of us um first of all for your transparency and the way this process has gone i loved the way mr key favor laid that out and all the communications and the opportunities that we've had up until this point to hear the thought processes and to understand the whys behind what's going on um from the time mr keyfavor started having meetings

075with us at the schools i'm a teacher at southwood i've made sure to stay in contact with the administrators and i've watched the work sessions online and i feel like i've um had a good opportunity to understand really how we've gotten here and what's going on so i really appreciate that um the other thing that i've really appreciated is your willingness to not just settle for the status quo with education in wabash as a teacher and a parent of three kids i am incredibly proud of what we do at southwood high school i'm incredibly proud of my kids have actually been on both sides i've had kids at metro north and at sharp creek and i've chosen to bring them to southwood um for a variety of reasons but mostly to get them closer to

076me um and i've had incredible experiences with all of the schools and so i'm super proud of what we do there but i also as a senior class sponsor i'm getting ready to prepare for graduation on saturday with 44 seniors at southwood i've watched it happen over the years and you know i'm one of those dual credit instructors and i'm one of the electives teachers that my class numbers just keep dwindling and it's it's a beautiful thing to have small classes but it's a challenging thing when i'm trying to teach high level education um academic subjects to one or two kids at a time there's things that i could do with bigger classes and so um i just appreciate that you're not looking at the cheapest way to provide a good education but you're willing

077to look at what we could do to provide the best education for the kids of wabash county because if i'm doing my math right two of my three kids could graduate from this new high school and i am extremely excited about the opportunities that this would allow them to have that they might not have otherwise so um thank you for all of those things and i guess the only thing else that i would say is if there's people in this community that don't understand the whys or don't understand the numbers or don't understand what's going on um i encourage you to reach out to any of these people because i have done so many times and they've been very forthcoming with information i know it gets a little overwhelming sometimes but i'll be one of

078the first to get on there and use that tax calculator to see because it's going to affect our tax bill significantly too um and so then you've got to just decide whether it's worth it or not whether that educational opportunity is worth it for the kids in the community i i think that it is and i think that it's good for me as a teacher it's good for my kids that their education and it's good for our community as a whole but i respect that everybody may not follow on that side of it but i hope that people if this makes it to a referendum can show up in november and have an educated opinion about what they're voting on i would hate for people to just take what they see on facebook and just

079take the um opinions of a few and use that to make up their minds so thank you again for everything that you've done to get us to this point because i know it's been a lot of work uh next person who indicated that they would like to speak is carol cohen [Music] well actually i wanted clarification on the tax thing which he did um and the fact that there's one 44 seniors at southwood is incredible to me um [Laughter] all right the next person who said they wouldn't like to speak is dana hornett so i actually had a few pages but i think some of the things have been answered and you are daniel cornett from uh southwood high school i graduated there in 2020. first off i appreciate like carrie johnson said the transparency

080there's been i really appreciate the student aspect of it i'm very student first if you don't already know i'm going into education looking at this district to teach in so this high school could potentially be my new workplace uh as somebody who's looking at it from the future my concern are the current teachers that are in the buildings primarily you've got like my key favor said duplicates of everything and the my question is and i don't know if it can be answered right now is how do you determine who to cut who to keep in this new building if at all if you're looking to keep the teachers and increase the number of classes of a certain subject or if you're looking to decrease the number of classes and cut down i think i have

081like five science teachers for southwood cut down to like two science teachers that focus on the different subjects uh my concern is how do you decide between the ones that have been there for 15 20 years versus the new hires that are coming in that self would particularly i've noticed i've posted like on facebook several job openings where that comes in how will they be able to vibe for a position at this new high school if it comes to that and the concern is as a as somebody who will be coming in pretty much a few years before this high school opens how can somebody who's looking at this job be willing to go yeah i'm willing to put my hat in the ring when there's teachers like lindsay me currently at southwood who will

082be doing it at that point for approximately five years by the time this high school opens i'm just looking at the incoming teachers those people that you're looking to hire i really hope that this new high school provides the opportunity for them to work there and it's not just based off of well this person's been with the district for 25 years at the same time i don't want those teachers who have been there built the relationships with the students to just go you're gone you've been here long enough and i don't know if that's been very clear it might have been i haven't attended all the meetings i don't know everything per se about this but if there could be some clarification i'd be willing to hear it that's just my concerns for the teachers

083that will be going to this new high school and how that divides out so thank you guys very much and i want to say daniel um it was very fun and exciting to have you as on the superintendent advisor team for four years and i appreciate all you're doing at manchester uh university and what you're doing uh with the song that you created um that's just fantastic so thank you for that and i will say at this time we are continuing to work on a frequently asked question document and that document actually addresses that too but overall you know we're looking at providing more opportunities as part of this and so providing more opportunities without actually um make it so we keep those educational staff and there would not be hardly any changes at all

084if any and you kind of said that earlier too you said if any and i think that's really how that would work out because the situation that we're in that when we talk about efficiencies that efficiencies with our education fund is a lot different than what the operations is and how that works and how you saw where dr had all of the utility costs and things like that from a 5 billion degree building so we feel like there's a lot more opportunities for our staff or present staff and even for young teachers coming in too but we'll put more things on there but yeah so all right thank you next we'll hear from nancy cronin instagram 4644 north 300 webs last week i came to just get information and i did and i got more

085tonight which has answered a lot of my questions i'm probably the oldest one in this room and mr key favorite i was the last graduating class from noble township in 1962. so i knew most of those gentlemen and i lived through all of that the forming of the msd and everything at 60 years it is time that we do something and i will admit that and being the oldest one here i would probably say the thing that scares me is the 115 and i know young people probably don't think a thing about that this just goes but i think what it's going to do to my taxes i'm a senior citizen my salary is not going to increase i am stuck there and you know i get this reassessment paper in the mail why my

086house is worth so much more than it was 50 years ago when i moved in but that didn't put any change in my pocket you know i just get to pay more taxes and the farmland and so being an old senior citizen that's what concerns me i mean i think we should give the best possible education to our kids that we can afford i have two grandchildren that are teachers i'm going to be paying for this for the rest of my life if it goes through i mean let's face it i mean i'll be lucky if i'm here in 20 years so i paid for it the rest of my life my grandkids i've got to say oh you're going to be paying for this to your 40 or 45 years old that's what pulls

087me back a little bit so and i appreciate what you guys have done you are in a no-win situation here because not everybody's going to be happy we know that but anyway thank you uh next we will hear from andrea benzo hi i'm andrea benbow 2775 east 1100 south fountain and uh my dad is a teacher at marriott i was going to ask math math teacher social studies social schooler oh let's talk about so going on both sides i graduated from southwood i didn't realize my class was huge apparently but i heard the other side from the big school because they graduated 800 one year anyway um i guess being a parent of two elementary kids that are in the south part of the county and who would be at the age that when they're

088in high school this would be the high school they're going to i have a lot of reservations about a school this far up my kids coming this far when they're in indiana now a lot of options you don't have to send a kid to school in your district anymore you want to retain students well for me and i know other people in the south part of the county that's a big question mark for a lot of us how far away that high school's going to be compared to other places we could have our kids go and um i also was really interested in your points about the facilities how many schools we have the capacity that we're not using right now and how much each building is costing and i saw that you did i

089mean as a board look at a few different options and one option i didn't see up there that maybe you considered it early on it wasn't feasible but whether there was any consideration to closing the elementary schools adding on where you need to to the high schools and making them kindergarten through 12. southwood and northfield there are schools in indiana that operate that way they have one campus they have kindergarten through twelve they're not that big but they function and you don't have huge drives huge commutes huge bussing here and there where kids are crossing it's a mess you keep in your own area because you know just that's feasible transportation gas getting bus drivers to drive those long routes i mean that could be a consideration to whether people want to keep doing that

090so um that was just i came to the meeting last week and just looking at everything that was just something that occurred to me and i didn't know if that was anything that's ever been so i just thought i'd bring up that thank you for your time next we will hear from mike whitney yeah mike brigny from the fountain um he answered a couple of my questions i believe you know what if the referendum fails and plan b would be to go back to this like the uh reconfiguration from a few years back is that corrected my assumption on that idea or or retain all schools we put that on the boat right okay but that one didn't check any of the boxes the other one at least a few um also uh another question

091here is you want to attract more students and i think maybe in the beginning you may lose a few but then in the long run i i still see you just stealing from the county again from school corporation food corporation same thing that's been happening in the last 10 years one family goes here we don't like you we'll move back here it's just back and forth and with adding a higher tax rate i believe that's going to cause more families to say no we're not going to move here and we'll still end up having the same issues over and over again another question goes what if for some reason the enrollment does go up in our school and i don't how big how many students do you want this building that how many is it

092going to hold you know right now we got 509 he said in northfield and southwood how much are you going to build just hold 500 600 600 what if enrollment goes up to 700 and we need to add on where's that money that comes from you can do another referendum and raise taxes again in our quarter you know that's essentially what you're you're hoping you retain and attract more students that's that's a good possibility you know you gotta look that that direction um and at what point do you gain so many students stealing from the county does the state come in and say you need to do the dreaded sea word then what i don't know how that will all work out would the msd people be stuck in the building the entire bill when

093everybody else comes in or or how's that gonna work and the other concern that i have is a few years back the thing that was brought up with the dreaded c word was oh your taxes are going to go up your taxes are going to go up that was the big fear that you all put in everybody's heads taxes are going to go up well here we go again taxes are going way up this time so apparently taxes wasn't the real reason you didn't want to see a consolidation last time because these taxes are going to go way up beyond what that would have been mr ribby i appreciate your concern but again i'm going to ask you to keep your topic your questions and comments well you had mr drake uh sitting in walmart

094city schools with a little presentation he got so i don't see why i can't put in something here you used it i don't see why i can't what is good for thee is you know not good for you okay uh mr downey did you have you have a question mark well kind of yes no i uh for those who didn't even care i was a 1963 graduate from south this year and yes you are one year older than that and i've admired you for many years [Music] appreciate the hard work of being on a position like this because it doesn't come and you cross a lot of bridges with a lot of people my respect was to read these comments and i do have to be concerned about going before you go forward going backwards

095when my wife said this with me and if you add together what we counted numbers of graduates in metro but you also need to look at wabash and how we can exhausted all possibilities of one central high school because as part of what he mentioned about what could come down the road and really having underplanted it could help but the big thing is you only get one shot at this and i know that weighs heavily on all of i've been in these positions different times over the years farmland should be mentioned a little more than it is on how we're going to be affected but all of us farm people here we we know what's coming our way and it's hard to visualize you own a house and base all these decisions to what these

096school boards are going to do and how much it's going to raise up for you but it's another thing when your livelihoods based off of nothing but solely agriculture and i don't know how you answer that we do need to take care of the kids they're the most precious thing that any of us will ever have they're one of god's gifts and that's a fact but you do have to have a responsibility in these decisions but when when you stood up and talked um [Music] i thought that kind of plagues me when when we built ourselves into this scenario i just lived too many years and 115 million dollars and i'm quite aware what's going on in this world that we're living in financially and anybody who wants to turn their their head and stick

097it in sand like the ostrich we're in a very turbulent time financially we don't know where that's going to end and i think if you're not up to speed we should really start reading and finding out where we are as a country financially so my question kind of is like this and i don't know how to ask you to get the right answer but i'm just presenting it so you you can all think once again about what you're about to say yesterday if we were to take a scenario of a 35 to 65 reduction in the in the stock markets and it's happened before and there's a lot of people who thinks it's about ready to happen again and i know that's here saying they say type thing but if you don't if you don't

098acknowledge it i want to know what's going to happen to this whole decision when we're in for 115 million dollars and all of a sudden things are only worth a little bit of what they were when we went into it and that needs to have some serious thought do do we need to make a change absolutely schools when when we went into the schools and my senior year i knew most of those people personally and i was i was a young person and the scuttlebutt was just horrendous between the city schools and the country schools and i'm sure you've all heard the war stories as young people they were true the city and country when it came to this was almost tapered towards each other wabash came back to us not too long ago and

099wanted to do something for us to go together and for our own reasons we chose a different path but here we are again today getting ready to make the decision and uh i think we need to fully understand where we're about ready to put our tax dollars payment uh into everybody's pocket what we're going to have to talk about and i don't know whether making sense to you or not but i see i sense things on the horizon that we're going to have to adjust our lives significantly probably sometime this next decade and uh where would we be if all of a sudden everything retracted what would you be telling us at that point are we locked into it uh the payment's gonna be forgiven because the world changed for the next few years and

100and that's really what i wanted to ask i'm not trying to put a kink in this because i really believe in what you're doing but uh that does concern me so that's kind of what i wanted to say and thank you thank you mr john nice to hear from you sterling okay i don't know i don't want to stand up because somebody's going to have to look at my backside honestly um i had a lot of strong feelings that kind of made the announcement of this building project make me step back a minute and i i i have had some of the same feelings that michael had initially why is it okay now to put this tax burden out there when it wasn't okay before but here i i have asked a lot of questions

101when mr key favor presented at our school i'm a second grade teacher at metro north my address is 3215 west division red sorry i forgot that um when he presented at the school i have some questions and being close to retirement gives a person some freedom to speak that's what's the worst that can happen i can only have two questions just let you know so anyway i asked some of my questions um some of my questions were answered i still have some questions about this whole thing and what it will look like and i don't know the answers to all the questions these are the things i do know though when i graduated in 1981 i graduated with a graduating class of around 120-125 when my daughter graduated 30 years later from northfield in 2011

102she had a graduating class of around 120. same ballpark my nephew was graduating this year from northfield and has half them half that size of class and that is not i don't know i've had people say when we went through this whole talk of consolidation a few years ago i'm not getting off topic i promise don't you want your kids to go through this go through go to the same kind of school you went to don't you want your grandkids to go the same kind of school you went to and i said yes i do that is the point because northfield and southward aren't the schools that they were when mr key favor and i graduated from them i was in a strong band program i was in a strong choir program we had a

103big drama department those were my things and it breaks my heart that those programs are dying at our schools not because we don't have kids interested we don't have enough kids to fill them and with you know with more sports offerings which we have now there are more opportunities for kids in sports than there were when i was in high school but because we have less kids those sports are pulling from every other program and we have kids really having a heart ident hard time having an identity in high school because they don't have anything and having an identity in high school is and there aren't there's not enough diversity in our schools right now because they're so small for some of our kids to ever find an identity there and that's a very lonely

104place to be without that another thing that i know is we are not all going to agree on what is the best course of action but we can't keep waiting around until we all agree and we can't keep waiting around till we get our way and i know there are a lot of sides to this argument i don't know exactly what side i'm on but i know that i'm not on the side of doing nothing anymore we have to do something sorry anyway um i'm not i'm not i'm not okay with just sitting and doing nothing and i know it is a big financial commitment on the part of the school board on the part of the constituents of the county but here's the thing we've talked about back in the 60s well here's the

105thing back in the 60s our fathers and grandfathers stepped up and said we're going to support this because it's the best thing to do and it's what we need to do to secure the educational future of our kids and now it's our turn to step up and say this is going to hurt a little bit and this is going to be scary but it's time for us to step up and make some hard decisions that will secure the educational future of our kids and we can't sit back and just worry about what's comfortable for me anymore we have to look forward and i know that you might think i have a different perspective just because i'm a teacher and that does make a difference because i see those babies go through i saw a little

106girl this year in my class that has very limited academic potential she's an amazing artist if somebody gets a hold of her and channels her and makes her believe that she can be somebody because of that art skill even though reading is not her thing even though math is not her thing that's going to change her life if we miss that and let her fall through the cracks that's not a burden that i want to live with i'm also a grandma now that has changed my perspective because my baby's going through these schools and i want the best for her friends and so i feel like we've got to do something and here's the thing i've had some trust issues in the past with school board decisions even with some past administrators i will just

107say this out loud i told them when they were at school regardless of how i feel about anybody else i trust these three men because they have stood by us they've made good decisions i have seen their passion for kids live out in the decisions they make and i am ready to step up and say let's do it i come from a farming family i i'm i'm i was born in the kill if i know it's going to hurt but it's time we need to finally we need to do our part and step up for this next generation like our grandfathers and fathers did for us that's all we have [Music] miss sterling and also mr regna and i've heard a couple other people say again i want to just reiterate but why now mr

108keyfavor answered that earlier and by adding some additional slides for a an additional slide to a slide deck from last week but i think we just kind of skimmed over there first of all again even though there's a little volatility in the last week or so mr eliza we are at historically low interest rates and we do know that because of that volatility that the building costs are only going to go up it is time that we step up and do something this is a you know this is something the board could just kick down the road again and let some other board figure out what to do to become more efficient with our building use but it's time that we look for the next 60 years and so if we're going to look at

109that next 60 years do it before those costs just keep going up and we're in a lot better situation now than we were the last time we considered anything my gosh when i came on this board we had some problems with our finances when i ran for school board the first time we were half a million dollars in debt we now have roughly 9 million dollars in our education fund and four almost five in our operation fund is that right mr we didn't have that kind of money then and so there was no way that we would consider taking on additional debt in that situation but the most important thing is that the retired debt at the end of why now instead of a couple years ago at the end of 2023 pretty much all

110of our debt if we did nothing if we just sat on our hands and said let it all just go let the schools go at the end of 23 2023 we're out of debt so the amount of interest that we're going to add back on there even though it seems astronomical to some people is not going to put us in a position where it's so much out of our yeah more than we can do based on what would have been a few years ago we would have tried this so i think just because of the the interest rates building's gonna cost her because it's going to keep going up and the fact that we're pretty much out of debt now this is the why now this is the time to strike and we as payne

111said we have to put something on our hands we've got to do something for the children the students because it's not just financial network that we're it's not just a financial problem that we're fixing by doing this it's much more than that it's the educational opportunities that we're not able to give our kids right now so that's my answer sir so we'll move on the next person who requested to speak was tiffany hawker i'm tiffany 151 state road 13 south savannah i'm a mom of northfield kids i'm a taxpayer i'm a financial advisor um when this first came out i was you know big numbers don't scare me they don't like i can keep it in perspective but i know that for a lot of people uh they're struggling in this county the elderly um

112you know where we have 40 50 60 percent of the kids in our schools are on pre-reduced lunches how is that going to impact their property taxes um it's going to impact them more than it's going to impact me if i told my kids i don't mind the tax increase i can afford it but there are a lot of people out there that can't we're asking an awful lot of them um i don't like that you guys all use the the number 115 million 115 million plus 70 million in interest that's 185 million that's what it's going to cost us to build that school 185 million write that down that's what it's going to cost us over the next 20 years not just us i looked at my senior daughter that's going to graduate this

113saturday or this sunday and i said you're going to be paying these property taxes to build this new school and it is part of our responsibility as citizens in this community to provide a great education for our kids but a great education doesn't come from one building a great education can come in a lot of different ways and um the other thing i want to talk about financial wise i assume you guys are assuming a three percent interest rate on the bond issue approximately what what we're at five percent you're five percent yeah so for every half a percent what's it going to add to our interest 15 million it's not going to have anything coming down you can never go above the number no i'm saying if you don't get the bond issued at

114five percent you have to go five and a half or six percent i do want me to answer the bonds can't be sold for that amount you'll have to do less or you can't do it and that doesn't and that means they might not be marketable it won't affect the marketability uh due to the fact that uh they're they're even with that amount of money their ratios are going to be fine the market will be there but the problem is the limit will be set we cannot exceed that five percent and at that point they would have to pay back their borrowing we could not go back up we cannot go higher so you're back there borrowing reduce the size of the school well they have to you have to you have to borrow less

115so you're gonna you're gonna force them to build a smaller school to accommodate i mean we're kind of on the cusp there they're saying we can take 600 kids but we have 500. and they're trying to they're trying to attract different kids and i have no comment on what they do but besides let's think through it reset the maximums and that the maximum payments cannot be exceeded so right whatever that will advertise is ultimately what what those limits would be said yeah um a reminder that that that actually is a 10 contingency and also several seven percent escalation which is a huge number also because of what you're saying but like he said at the beginning it's pretty volatile right now things can change in an instant right um mike you said last week something

116about um somebody asked about the job loss and you said well you know we'll have people retiring um and so it's not going to be an issue overwhelming with us enough staff that's what you said last week you go back and replay it what you're saying tonight is well we'll have more offerings and we can keep all the staff i think that they're going to be four or five years in there where people retire we don't rehire because we know this is coming down the pipeline and who gets to suffer are teachers that are left and the students so those are things you guys have to consider all of those things and it's not just financial i think we can do better for our kids with a different option and i think you guys all

117owe it to us as your as your voters and as your parents and as the people that you guys go to church and bank with to go out and find us better options we're not a kid that you're forced feeding broccoli to you better offer us for your news thank you for your comments jeremy wait yeah jeremy wade two or three extensions and i didn't bring the serial sneezer with me this number one at uh at what time will we get a breakdown uh the facilities that you're going to build add on or upgrade in the new building to so we we know where the costs are going i know there's going to be costs of land i know there's going to be you know the building itself are we upgrading uh sport facilities are

118we putting down um astro turf or we i mean is that built into all the cost i mean we're at what point in time do we see specifics of this of this new venture um and also i've heard a lot about utilities okay so if we build where you're saying we're gonna build what we have existing utilities now which covers probably gas and electric but doesn't cover so much i mean yeah you have you have wells and you have sewer you have a septic or a plant but when you get that close to town i'm pretty sure you guys aren't going to drill wells and you're not going to have a sewer plant you're probably going to pay to have that piped out to you have you figured out the cost of that water and

119sewer that you're going to be paying every month and i guarantee it's going to be well more than a dollar a kid every month so i mean was that was that put in the plans as well not sure if you know but we actually already do that on the north schools all that goes to the world and we're already doing that okay right but the sewer right not the water right okay but over here you're gonna have to re-pipe anyways and you're gonna have to are you gonna drill well i mean what what's when are we going to find out the specifics of of the building yeah yeah part of that will come later once we i mean we don't have drawings we don't have that we have um you know we have the financial

120part with the square feet and all those different things with all the are the are those things that are going to come out prior to a vote yeah that would be before november or the only i mean my concern is is you know like and i understand you have a certain protocol that you gotta do like putting it out in the and uh in the plane dealer well i'm telling you that the two people that read that don't pass it around and there's guys like me that actually had a bunch of kids opportunities but i do get a call when i'm down to 25 cents on their lunch account so i waited something to blast out so um my thing is i i would love to go through all of the information before i even

121dare place a vote on a new school and not to mention you're talking about attraction if you're building this uh school out here and i'm i'm i'm a grad of uh south wind so is my wife my parents i mean you know we my uh my grandmother went to somerset and graduated from somerset so you know my family's been on the south end of town and is it feasible for me to bring my kids all the way across town or when it's closer for me to go to oak hill you know you're going to lose people that way just by logistics alone and we're not even talking about the programs that they offer that we may not offer because god forbid we work within the community to to use facilities that we have grand facilities

122in town that we can use and we don't use them i don't understand that so that all aside we're talking about retaining people and with account you know with a county that we we are 93 percent higher in lloyd taxes than 61 counties in the state of indiana that's and we're we're the third highest the third highest that's amazing to me that we get to keep people in this county because i can move two counties to the to the west and get a dollar dollar fifty an hour increase in my pay just don't taxes and that's not including what we're gonna have to pay here now i'm not against paying taxes i pay them all the time but at some point there's going to be elderlies there that are going to have a problem well

123thank you for coming just know that obviously between now and november 8th a lot of these questions have to be answered i would expect it well right we have a lot more to do between now and november 8th and that includes a lot more community public meetings like this so that we can try to bring more of that information to maybe guide you to a better informed yes or no you know if you're gonna vote no you're gonna have better reasons on november 8th that you have today i appreciate you vote yes you're going to have better reasons than you do today right i appreciate that you guys got is when i left this this meeting last week i was super frustrated that i didn't feel like the transparency was there that needed to be

124but i was also not aware that you were going to take your time and put it answer all the questions one time and i appreciate that i really do but you guys have got to do a better job of getting this out in the community so people understand and they you want people to come in and and uh give their input because that that makes people feel a lot better and it's not as hard to swap swallow that's for sure and i'm not going to direct this at you to anybody including anybody that might be watching on facebook if you've not had an opportunity to go back and watch any of the public meetings that we've been doing since before covet please do because a lot of the questions that have been asked previous to

125tonight and even tonight have been answered at some of those meetings so we just recommend that you go back and and a lot more will be answered i don't disagree with that right but what i want to well i didn't disagree with is the fact that look there's so many people that work different shifts different and they don't have you know they may not i mean i hate to say it but they may not have access to the internet but but we've got to get that a little bit i mean we're talking about people thinking their taxes are going to triple all total that to me means someone didn't do their due diligence and getting information out okay jeremy i want to say something first of all though i didn't know my wife's here but

126my wife and i get to playing the other side i guess we're the only ones that get to play because i don't know anybody else 1980 graduate of northfield 1981 graduate southwood so that kind of works out too for you there you go yeah we'll talk yeah um here are some things too uh number one on our website and i know that's not a call that you would give but on our website the tax calculator will be on there if um the resolutions are passed tonight also the slideshows that mr elizondo put up we'll put that on there our sliding show will be on there also the uh frequently asked questions and so it won't be in the plane dealer but it will be on the website too and i know not everyone gets that

127but but if they want those things we can print that out for those if they don't have the internet so we've blasted that out i mean i get a call for some of some other things and i don't know if you can do that or not yeah but it's a good idea i mean people get it we all get the paper right but we can't that's not part of the legal part of it that we have they don't have legals like we do so but i understand what you're saying does anybody don't get to follow so that's what it is all right all right well okay we're gonna go ahead and uh that was it on the people who requested this week can i still sign in on it nope i'm just saying because kevin

128can answer this one how much is it per acre because i know kevin's down the number i don't care about a house i don't care about a house i want to know the number tell me the number i honestly don't know man i'm scared to know you have an idea is it 10 bucks is it 15 bucks because everybody's glossing over i want to know what it is okay the other thing i'm going to ask and i probably should have asked before i thought i don't know why did you we're going to ask you to direct your comments to the board in general not just yes sorry board would like to answer it i'm just curious we'll find it out later okay i'm just curious because i think there's a lot of different situations is

129it a good place my second question is and it was already asked but nobody answered it if this referendum passes can you vote on another one if you pass this is it a 20-year fix to where you hit a snag like huntington can you go back in and get more money or is this all you can get for 20 years can somebody answer that because that's being glossed over i don't know if i did so did someone ask me what i don't know okay he asked that question if we hit a snag after we go can we vote on another referendum or is this 20 year fixed is that all we can do not everything has to be done as a referendum if something if we've decided that we needed to add another classroom sure

130there are maximums that we can borrow take out bond issues and we've done it in the past even when i've got on this board we can do that so this is not going to be a fixed tax rate for the next 20 years this can still keep going up we can take this hit in 10 years we could take another hit it could go down yes we've done general obligation bonds in the last seven years that i've been on this board at the end of next year we're still debt free so it's not a permanent right we have to go and and do another geo bond for a million dollars to add on yes a million one i'm just curious in 10 years we had a snag like huntington and they went from 5a to

131what 3a after they built that who's going to pick up that tab when we have to raise more money that's my question okay yeah you get three of them i think you said three did they go to three no i said i mean you had three questions you want to ask oh my my last one was just i agree with what tiffany said if you're going to talk about a number make it 180 make it the real number i think that's a disservice to say 150. you're insulting the intelligence of your community yeah it's in the resolution so that's the problem the legislation but we're going to talk a number let's talk about them all right we're going to move on because we have other business to deal with so i'd like to thank all

132of you who participated in the in the hearing we do appreciate your interest in you know wanting to be here and appreciate your comments but at this point i am waiting for the script yes i am so i want to let you know that the board is going to do everything that we can to be you know conservative with our tax dollars but at this time i'm going to ask mr keifer to summarize the project resolution so the project resolution is required when schools plan to spend more than a million dollars for a given facility it contains the estimated hard and salt construction cost and the cost of the issuance and establishes the total project cost it also contains the estimated tax impact under unfinished business then so we've had a second preliminary determination at

133this point we have a recommendation to adopt a project resolution and i have a motion and second to adopt any project resolution i'll make that to the discussion if not all in favor say aye oppose the aye time mr key favor could you summarize the preliminary determined resolution preliminary determination resolution yes preliminary determination resolution is required when a school is planning to finance more than certain thresholds on a construction project it contains the total project cost maximum annual payment and lease term and other financial terms such as the estimated principal amount and tax impact is there a motion to put on the recommendation to adopt the preliminary determination resolution so motion and second to adopt the preliminary determination resolution all in favor say aye aye opposed samsung and finally the recommendation to adopt the reimbursement

134resolution is your key favorite that you summarize that for us yes the next resolution is a reimbursement resolution relating to the financing of the construction project this resolution permits the school corporation to reimburse itself from bond proceeds for any cash which it might spend on the project prior to the closing on the balance is required by federal tax law in order to preserve the school corporation's ability to reimburse itself is there a motion to adopt the reimbursement resolution as recommended i need to approve that reimbursement resolution second motion and second to adopt the reimbursement resolution all in favor say aye aye same sign okay that finishes the unfinished business for this evening we have no board policy we did do public comment there just now so any items from board members i do know the

135agriculture community uh is about 40 45 of the property tax debt load up and you see most of us up here sitting i have to be faced with that same decision um yeah i think perhaps scott one thing that should be brought up is what happens is michael's saying this doesn't happen we have gone through uh pretty good studies of what the buildings will need in the next 10 15 year window and that number's rather tall too so not the building the school puts the ending the kind of repairs you know we've all had things that immediately require repair it's part of the consideration okay there aren't any other items board members we are adjourned