Rebuilding A Busted Bond
Faced with a bruising debt crisis that is bringing new borrowing to fund capital projects to all but a screeching halt, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education this week started a process of prioritizing school construction plans. Or maybe that should be re-prioritizing.
When voters approved a record-high $516-million school bond in 2007, the board of education had a prioritized list of capital projects slated to receive the money, everything from new schools and renovated classrooms to auditoriums and stadiums. Critics of the bond bonanza, however, contended that in several cases the school board’s liberal majority had pushed pet projects based on political agendas to leap frog in priority over projects originally ranked higher because of pressing needs.
What many considered a grossly misprioritized schools building plan originally looked to be on schedule to bulldoze its way through all $516 million worth of construction without a hitch. Then the bottom fell out; buried under an imploding debt burden and tumbling revenues, the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners put the brakes on new borrowing, and by extension CMS’ aggressive spending and building plan.
The district’s mantra of “promises made, promises kept,” for building new schools and completing renovations of older ones, was reduced to promises pending, with about $314 million of the $516-million bond package left on the table.
County commissioners last year indicated they would try to borrow at least $70 million to fund CMS capital projects this summer. More recently that already-tepid assurance has cooled to the possibility of delaying any borrowing until a later date. That prospect has forced the school board to confront a new reality.
“When CMS had all the money in the world, they could afford to include pet projects to placate their constituents and special interest groups,” said Commissioner Bill James, a Republican who represents a largely suburban district in south Mecklenburg.
“The reality now is they can no longer afford to do that. They know the priorities they have to build are in the ‘burbs,” James said. “The question is, are they willing to address the needs before the wants, or continue building things for political patronage?”
If Tuesday night’s school board meeting was any indication, some board members are ready to aggressively push to maintain a schools construction schedule that mirrors the one crafted to pass the 2007 bonds, and resist any significant changes that reprioritize which projects should be built first or which ones should be delayed.
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