You Don't Need Money, Just a Little Bit a Month...
1996 AISD Bond Election
By Roseana Auten, Fri., Feb. 23, 1996
Although the district would probably claim it has been at the tender mercy of landowners, AISD's past dealings and attitudes toward its contribution to growth on the aquifer, in particular, should give pause.
Bowie High School, the jewel of the Circle C Ranch subdivision, was built in 1988 on 64 environmentally sensitive acres, right in the recharge zone of the Barton Springs section of Edwards Aquifer. Another site southeast of present-day Bowie, out of the recharge zone, had been selected -- but that was not to be, laments Bill Bunch, director of the SOS Legal Defense Fund. Instead, Circle C developer Gary Bradley swept in and made AISD an offer on another parcel too good to refuse -- a nice chunk of land right on his tony residential development.
The law firm in which then-school board President Ed Small is a partner had handled legal work for Bradley before, and there was much slapping of good old boys' backs as the Bowie deal was inked. The school district, Bradley, and Small later defended themselves in a lawsuit brought by the owners of the first parcel of land who'd been snookered out of the deal, says Bunch. The defendants prevailed in a summary judgment. The Texas Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Bowie became AISD's tenth high school.
"It was stinky," says Bunch.
Both Small and former AISD counsel Bill Bingham have a slightly different memory of those events. For starters, they each say the original Bowie site's being on or off the recharge zone was "not an issue." The district was originally looking at two adjacent parcels of land for Bowie, they say. One owner wanted to sell, the other didn't, and AISD was going to have to condemn the property of the recalcitrant landowner. (The landowner who was ready to sell brought the lawsuit, claiming breach of contract.)
Hey, say the dealmakers, it was just an expedient decision! Bradley simply saw an opportunity, and offered up his land at a fair price, which was complete with infrastructure and ready to build. "So we jumped on it," says Small. It's true that another attorney at Small, Craig & Werkenthin had once done a piece of work for Bradley, Small says. But knowing how the relationship would be magnified in the minds of others, he says, he got off the dais when the board voted to buy the land.
Details aside, the point that can't be smoothed over is the district's sometimes blasé attitude toward its responsibility to the environment. If mitigating the district's effect upon the aquifer was "not an issue" for AISD in 1988, it appears that it became downright irksome by 1994, under the SOS ordinance, when AISD entered into an interlocal development agreement with the City of Austin.
In an August 12, 1994 memo to then-interim Superintendent Terry Bishop and the board of trustees, Bingham informed them that AISD had "received as much relief from development ordinances as was politically possible..." (emphasis added). He noted that potential changes in state law or pending court decisions might allow AISD to comply with a more "favorable" ordinance in the future. Bingham suggested that in the meantime, the superintendent and board might just publicly say that AISD had simply brokered the best possible deal for the taxpayers, even though "it is still very burdensome and expensive for the School District..."
Was AISD just putting fiscal concerns first, or grossly underestimating how committed its residents were to SOS? What did "burdensome and expensive" really mean? Well, to build another Bowie High School under SOS would have required the school district to acquire about 125 acres of land instead of 64 (and Bishop had once quipped that in that case, the district may as well open a magnet school for ranching). Clearly, by working an escape hatch into the interlocal agreement, AISD hoped that SOS would not be a factor in its future; indeed, it is not. But unlike SOS, the uproar over the distinct possibility of more schools on the aquifer -- especially with the attendant migration, traffic, and environmental degradation a sparkly, new, suburban secondary school brings -- has not vanished.
The bond package totals $369 million, broken out into three propositions for renovations, new construction, and technology infrastructure (see sidebar). Proposition 2, almost $177 million, would go toward construction of 11 new facilities (plus wing additions on older ones): eight elementary schools (three of which would go in Southwest Austin -- an area that represents nearly one-third of AISD's 230.7 square miles), two middle schools (one in South and one in Southwest Austin), and a high school south of the Colorado River. A citizens' bond advisory committee report had only recommended nine new schools. But further analyses by an independent demographer showed that projected enrollment growth in the north and northeast areas of town warranted the addition of two more elementary schools in those zones.
This apparent expansion of generosity toward the rest of AISD hasn't quelled critics of expansion into Southwest Austin. Some neighborhood associations and environmental groups say that upon studying the proposed bond package, they're nowhere near ready to endorse it. They argue that an additional southwest high school, especially, would exacerbate environmental degradation if it's erected anywhere on the aquifer. Others further maintain that another southwest high school and middle school would continue to re-segregate the district and erode the central city schools.
Support this bond package? No way, says Bunch -- if anticipated sites for the new schools aren't revealed ahead of time. Nope, says George Cofer, programs manager of the Save Barton Creek Association -- especially if the school board won't pledge to stay off the contributing and recharge zones of the aquifer and instead direct growth toward the central city. Uh-uh, says Beverly Griffith, president of the West Austin Neighborhood Group (WANG) -- especially without knowing whether new attendance boundaries would radically alter the racial and economic mix in the rest of the district's schools.
"All the environmentalists want to know is where the schools are not going to be," says Bunch. "The school board wouldn't even do that."
"We've decided it's a deal-breaker with us," says Cofer. At a February 11 meeting of the Central Texas Environmental Network, 41 participants unanimously voted to oppose passage of the bonds unless new secondary schools are prohibited from the entire aquifer.
"Families here value the education in diversity their children are getting," says Griffith. "And they're worried that new schools in the suburbs will draw away the middle class."
Emphatic statements from the board against placing secondary schools on the aquifer, specifics on site selection, or proposed boundary changes -- none of this is forthcoming before the election. "I just feel like their saying `Trust us' is completely inappropriate," Bunch says.
Not everyone who marches under the environmental banner agrees, however. "I hate to polarize and have lines drawn in the sand when [where to locate a school is] a site-specific question," says Sue Johnson, director of District 5 of the Barton Springs/Edwards Aquifer Conservation District. Johnson readily agreed that new secondary schools should probably not be built in the recharge zone, but she says that building in the contributing zone, especially on uplands, could be managed.
Despite the fact that five trustees -- Kathy Rider, Jerry Carlson, Tom Agnor, Liz Hartman, and Melissa Knippa -- demurred on a motion by board member Geoff Rips to keep new secondary schools out of the recharge zone of the aquifer, they still consider themselves sensitive to environmental concerns -- and what's more, they say, they always have been. A substitute environmental resolution or "covenant with the voters," introduced by Carlson at the board's February 3 special meeting to set the bond election order, was adopted unanimously.
In it, the board pledged to: keep all new schools built over the recharge or contributing zones of the aquifer 300 feet away from any critical environmental feature; provide for playland to reduce impervious cover; conduct traffic-impact analyses; and have AISD staff meet with the Barton Springs/Edwards Aquifer Conservation District to discuss how to avoid critical recharge features.
Hartman says she well knows that the recharge zone is neither a first nor a logical choice for a secondary school -- and she definitely prefers not to locate a big school there. But the board has two responsibilities -- one to the environment, and one to the taxpayers. She says she believes the board can do both -- but they need "flexibility" to accomplish it.
Knippa, whose district encompasses Southwest Austin and whose pleas for relief from overcrowding are the most highly criticized, agreed. She says that parents in her district feel as though they pay their fair share of taxes and don't understand why they must continue to send their children to elementary schools with enrollments of 1,000-plus. AISD must take care of the environment, but "at the same time, it's our sworn responsibility to take care of school children," she says.
"I make my environmental argument and they respond with a fiscal argument," says Bunch. (But even he has his own fiscal argument: "We want them to stop using tax dollars to kill the aquifer.")
Has AISD only responded to the environmental argument with paeans to fiscal responsibility? Knippa doesn't think so. The district's already shown commitment to the environment with Bailey Middle School, built on the recharge zone in 1993, she says. Bailey's site, which features a detention pond at the rear of its 40 acres, was originally supposed to support an elementary school as well.
"We didn't do that. We could have," she says. "But we're using that land for water quality." (Upon hearing the name of Bailey, Bunch shook his head in regret. The water quality ordinance under which that school was built is not good enough, he says.)
But even Rips, largely seen as the trustee who keeps the environmentalists' flame, isn't necessarily convinced that his fellow trustees will act irresponsibly as far as the environment is concerned. "And I think it's essential to pass the bonds," he says.
As for charges that AISD will help feed expansion with new schools in the southwest, Knippa counters, "`Suburban sprawl' is when somebody moves to Leander or Hays County. AISD has never been the reason something has grown." Board Vice President Carlson concurs, in businessman's vernacular. "We're not the leading edge," he says. "In fact, we're way behind the power curve on this thing. Right now, we're playing catch-up" to growth.
The board and AISD super- intendent James Fox are quite emphatic about one thing: Contrary to rumors, AISD is only building schools for the bodies it has already counted. They claim they just don't have the luxury of getting out ahead of development.
AISD's internally generated enrollment projections, which were reviewed, revised, and reconfirmed by the outside firm of Harner and Associates, are based on a statistical methodology known as "cohort survival." Simply stated, demographers count the number of kids in the first grade class, and keep track of them until that class graduates. From looking at how many "cohorts" remain in that year's class, compared with preceding and succeeding years' classes, a pattern of enrollment growth or decline emerges.
This method does not work for figuring out how many kindergartners will show up in any given year, however. (AISD has had its share of gaffes in this regard; one year, 500 more 5-year-olds arrived for their first day of school than the district had planned.) Counting annual live births in the county only provides one clue; demographers look also at single- and multi-family housing permits and study migration patterns in neighborhoods; enrollment in private kindergarten also makes the public kindergarten enrollment figure fluctuate every year.
The possible instability of this ground floor of each year's new kindergarten class, combined with a super-rosy forecast of the district's future success in retaining and recovering high school dropouts, has led to worries among some that AISD is really overpredicting its enrollment growth. Board member Rips, who was gravely concerned about this, says he is now more convinced that the numbers are reliable -- especially since they've been recast to reflect growth north, as well as south, of the river.
Dennis Harner, the consultant hired by the district, has consistently maintained that AISD is not cooking its numbers, "and I have seen numbers skewed in other instances," he says. The school demographics profession can be a gamble. Project numbers too high, and in a few years, the district has empty schools and angry taxpayers (this occurred in the Spring Branch school district near Houston). Low-balling a little bit is a lot less costly.
"A lot of times, we wait until we see the whites of their eyes," Harner says wryly, adding that his figures for enrollment projections are conservative. "If anything, the bond package is too small," says Harner. "I think we'll be back with another one before the year 2000."
But let's stay in 1996 for for the moment. The issue now, say all the critics, is trust. Can the stakeholders of AISD afford to trust this board and Superintendent Fox? These are, after all, the same folks who brought us Bowie High School, in Circle C, who whined about SOS...
"Wrong!" Hartman thunders. "We are not the same people who brought you Bowie High School. Absolutely not!" AISD's hired and elected leadership, and its legal counsel, has turned over since those days, she says (she's been a trustee since 1992). "I think we deserve a chance to earn trust before we have it taken away."
She and fellow trustee Knippa categorically deny that the board knows or has even discussed where new schools will be sited -- even though the district currently owns property suitable for elementary schools at Travis Country (off the Southwest Parkway), Maple Run, and the Village of Western Oaks (see map).
But is the district still playing bait-and-switch here, asking voters to approve money without revealing how it will be spent -- and being a little hinky about how the package is going to affect attendance boundary changes? Former citizens' bond advisory chair Mel Waxler has been working double-time these days, attempting to answer these complaints. He points to a campus-by-campus schedule of bond fund expenditures in the committee report (which he helped author), as well as an enhanced list of middle school spending compiled by the district -- evidence that the public can and should know how the money will be spent. (These reports are available for inspection in public libraries, AISD campuses, at central administration, and at the bond election campaign office.)
Waxler says that for the committee -- or the district -- to draw attendance boundaries before the election is "problematic," even if the boundaries were known. Unfortunately, no matter what information people are given, they'll tend to hold it hostage against their support for bonds if they are already disinclined to vote for them. To attempt to keep the boundary debate separate from the bond debate, the committee recommended (and the school board adopted) a resolution to put together an oversight committee to keep the bond expenditures open, honest -- and public. People should vote on whether they believe there is a need for the bonds, and participate in the spending and site process afterwards, he says.
This doesn't satisfy critics like Bunch, who has raised the ugly specter of a "Jim Bob Moffett High School" on the Southwest Parkway. "In a full and open debate after the election, I'd probably be on [Bunch's] side," Waxler says, with a little laugh.
As for countercharges that the district should reveal to the public where it is considering buying property -- any property -- trustees and district officials say open meetings law allows AISD to conduct those negotiations out of public view to avoid playing into the greedy hands of speculators and land flippers. But one trustee, Ted Whatley, says he has heard of communities in other states that do expose the process, "and I hope the other board members are ready to debate that."
If there is a large measure of disingenuousness infused in the bond issue debate, then there is also a distinct push to "set aside differences," and march on. Please! It's for the children! One participant in the citizens' bond advisory committee recognizes that the questions are divisive, but views them as absolutely essential. "We need to be airing those differences," says Max Woodfin, who declined last June to support the committee's recommendations, largely because he believed there were too many unknowns. "It's important for the board and the bond campaign committee to remain open-minded. They need to sit down and listen, and not preach."
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