Ad Hoc Committee Fails | Towns Backpedal | School District Exposed

Ad Hoc's Dinner (Market-Ticker)

From Wikipedia: "Eating crow (archaically, eating boiled crow) is an English-language idiom meaning humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proved wrong after taking a strong position."

It's official: The ad hoc school funding committee has capitulated, voting 14-2 against placing a sales tax increase initiative on the November ballot. It's all okay though, because they came up with an alternative plan--cue chirping crickets...

Voter apathy, anti-tax sentiment in the community and public relations challenges regarding school budgets were reasons given for not moving forward. (SHDN) It took them three months to figure that out? 

I wrote a post back in February titled How To Piss Off  A County, where I detailed how I saw this effort playing out:

"The cities, urged by the business community, have overstepped their bounds on the school issue and it's going to come back to bite every one of them. The leadership of Grand County, Fraser, Grand Lake, Granby and Winter Park are all going to be punished. Nothing could be more irresponsible than taking the opinions of business leaders as that of their communities. The representatives have failed their constituencies and, I would imagine, are finished politically."

I emailed this post to the county, every town and the school district.

Later in February, I wrote a post titled Grand County Being Duped By Special Interests.  Here, I pointed out how the Grand Foundation and the school district were planting stories in various media outlets in order to try to shape public opinion:

"This story puts a laser focus on how the media is being used by local interests to manipulate opinion with little more than poor reporting and a bit of word smithing."

This post was emailed to the Grand Foundation and addressed to Ron Nelson. I never heard back--I wonder why?

As part of the school bailout, each of the towns in the East Grand School District made subsequent pledges of money. Except for Barbara Atwater of the Winter Park Town Council (Bravo Barbara!), each town voted unanimously to approve school funding--despite many having fiscal challenges of their own. Today, we learn that the towns are reneging on their pledges:

"The Grand Lake board plans to discuss its $20,000 schools pledge on Monday, May 9.

“I really don't know at all how they're going to receive this,” said Grand Lake Manager Shane Hale. Hale said he has invited School District Superintendent Nancy Karas and District Board President Tom Sifers to the 3 p.m. workshop to explain to the town board the school's revised budget outlook.
The Winter Park town board is scheduled to discuss its $75,000 pledge at a 10 a.m. work session on May 10. Town Manager Drew Nelson said the board will likely have many questions for school board representatives.

In Granby, Town Manager Wally Baird said he plans to recommend that the Granby board withdraw its $20,000 pledge to the school foundation “because they haven't come up with a permanent solution.”(SHDN)  

All I can say about the above is, "Are you kidding me?" These people were pontificating about the children not three short months ago... 

The town of Fraser has a $1,000,000 deficit(!!). The Town of Granby, which is currently paying $15,000 dollars per year in interest on a loan they could pay off today, won't give the money due to a failure to raise sales taxes. Grand lake doesn't know how the schools could receive the money, and Winter Park has some tough questions for the school district.

One question: Why the hell was I the only one addressing these issues back then? Not one town held the district to account, and now they all are eating a nice fresh plate of crow. 

As for the school district, it did what it's been doing for years. The only problem this time around is that it duped our elected officials instead of the citizens. I was saying this three months ago, but it is now out in the open for everyone to see. 

So now what solutions are on the table? A state sales tax initiative, grant writing efforts and increasing the Education Foundation's visibility. There's also an effort to finagle cost-of-living numbers and exploit the low income student population. Do those sound like solutions to you? Come on people.

I asked then and I'll ask again: Is it time for the District #2's board and administration to resign? We have some very smart people, some who were on the ad hoc committee, who could help right this sinking ship.