West Valley School District sends $12 million construction levy to November ballots after February countywide bond failure

Millwood voters’ November ballots just got longer.

The 3,400-pupil West Valley School District is sending a property tax levy to the busy ballot. It seeks to pay for some construction projects that would have been funded under the district’s February failed bond.

If passed, voters would authorize the district to collect no more than $11.8 million in property taxes over the course of three years, taxing property owners at an estimated rate of $1 per $1,000 of assessed property value. This levy would replace an expiring capital levy voters approved in 2021, which will collect $1.26 per thousand in 2024, generating $13.4 million over its three-year life.

The West Valley school board on Wednesday unanimously decided to send the capital levy to November ballots to pay for construction at schools: modernizing entrance security, roof repairs at West Valley High School and updating pickup and drop-off areas at elementary schools.

The district repaired half of the roof on West Valley High School last summer, and now the district seeks funds to finish the job. Seth Woodard and Orchard Center elementaries have safety concerns in their parent pickup/drop-off areas, said Superintendent Kyle Rydell, and those would be addressed with tax collections under the replacement levy. They’re also seeking to update heating and cooling needs at the soon-to-be Millwood early learning center, which last year housed kindergarteners.

Without a capital projects levy, the district will have around $1 million in its fund balance earmarked towards construction, said Ayesha Horton, chief finance officer with the district.

“It makes me a little nervous,” Horton said. “It’s not the worst fund balance, but it definitely limits you on being able to do any preventative maintenance because you need to keep some sort of reserve in case something breaks.”

All five school bond asks around Spokane county failed to garner the 60% voter support necessary to pass in February, leaving districts to find other means to fund school construction staff say is necessary for their students. Of Spokane, Cheney, West Valley, Deer Park and Riverside, West Valley is the first to send another funding mechanism to ballots in the wake of its bond failure.

“It’s been heavy on the hearts and minds, so we were really sad to see that Spokane did not pass their bond as it’s representative of sort of a trend,” said Marissa Rathbone, the director of strategic advocacy at the Washington State School Directors Association.

Across the state, 7 of the 21 school districts that sought bonds met the supermajority threshold; 18 of the 21 earned a simple majority support.

In her role with the association, advocating for education policy at the legislative level, Rathbone plans to continue pushing the Legislature to lower the threshold for bond passage from a supermajority to a lower 55% or 50%.

“There are some compromises that have to be made with a capital levy, but also there’s urgency within the district to solve certain building problems that necessitate doing a levy if they can’t pass a bond,” Rathbone said.

One such urgency for West Valley was the expiration of their lease on a building housing preschoolers. They intended to use part of the bond revenue to pay for new classrooms in neighborhood schools for the district’s kindergartners, currently schooled from the Millwood Kindergarten Center, and shift preschoolers to the center previously occupied by kindergartners.

That plan is still in motion, only without bond revenue. The district used $5.2 million out of its capital fund balance to pay for extra rooms in Ness and Pasadena Park elementaries for kindergartners.

“With the bond failure, then it was a pivot, so really, the concept was that we can’t do nothing for three years,” Rydell said. “We just passed our (educational programs and operations) levy in February, so really, what do we need to do now to help maintain our district the way that it’s been maintained for several years?”

The bond would have cost property owners an estimated total of $150 million over the 20-year life of the tax measure for construction projects and to pay interest on the bonds. It would have taxed property owners at a rate of $1.49 per thousand, a liberal calculation from February based on interest rates and property values for the next two decades. Had the bond passed, the total tax bill would have been $3.93 per thousand.

Under the proposed renewal, Millwood property owners would pay a total estimated rate of $3.44 per thousand when accounting for the educational programs and operations levy passed in February.

The proposal also reduces property owners’ future tax bills after this year by around a 6-cent rate per $1,000 in assessed value, Rydell said.

Rydell hopes in three years, the district will have completed a few construction projects financed by the proposed capital levy and can present to voters a smaller bond during a better economic climate. That, coupled with alterations to the state match formula for school construction, will better appeal to 60% of voters, he hopes.

“Surveys have been really good to understand the perspective of our community,” Rydell said. “Of course, it’s taxes, it’s inflation, they’re paying more for gas, they’re paying more for groceries. That kind of resonated, from a lot of the conversations.”

“Let’s get ourselves a little bit further away from the pandemic, away from this economy to see if that helps us,” he said.