Wednesday, August 5, 2015

[Solano County] Guest Opinion: Deceptive ballot language for Solano College bond measure not unusual


The Solano County Grand Jury has released a report criticizing the official material given to Solano County voters about a bond measure on the November 2012 election ballot.
Voters were asked to authorize the Solano Community College District to borrow $348 million for construction by selling bonds.
On Election Day, 63.5 percent of voters approved the ballot measure.
But were those 89,634 voters deceived? Did the college give them an accurate description of what they were approving?
According to the Grand Jury report, “the language of Measure Q was misleading and contradictory, and failed to comply with the California Constitution and other applicable statutes, instead playing on the voter’s emotions in effort to obtain $348 million in funding to be paid back over a period of 40 years.”
Particularly detested by the Grand Jury was the cynical, manipulative way in which the college district engineered the language in the ballot information.
Rather than a balanced focus on the benefits of new college construction versus the cost of borrowing $348 million from wealthy investors and paying them back with interest, the ballot language was peppered with what the Grand Jury calls “buzz words.”
Words such as “veterans,” “disabled,” and “job training” were meant to entice voters as if building construction funded by borrowed money was a social justice program.
Measure Q was officially named the “Solano Community College District Student/Veterans’ Affordable Education, Job Training, Classroom Repair Measure.” But education and job training cannot be funded by Measure Q.
The California Constitution requires Solano Community College to spend the borrowed money on specific construction projects. And what were those construction projects?
The Grand Jury investigated the alleged “facilities master plan” available for review at the college president’s office, as indicated on the ballot information. As revealed in the report, “neither a Board approved Facilities Master Plan, nor a project list outlining plans for how the $348 million would be spent actually existed at the time voters went to the polls and approved Measure Q.”
As a small band of opponents alleged before the November 2012 election, Measure Q appears to be a grab by special interests for taxpayer money.
The top four contributors to the Measure Q campaign - donating a total of $83,000 - were bond brokers and construction management firms anticipating contracts after voters approved the bond measure. Construction trade unions were also major donors, and the college board rewarded them after the election with a Project Labor Agreement.
What Solano Community College did is not unusual. And nothing will be done about it.
When California voters approved Proposition 39 in 2000 and cut the approval threshold for educational bond measures from two-thirds to 55 percent, they expected taxpayer protections included in Proposition 39 and related laws to ensure accountability and transparency. But after fourteen years, California school and college districts know they can circumvent or ignore these protections and get away with it.
The California Policy Center, a public policy institute, will be publishing a comprehensive report in mid-July on the growing abuses of Proposition 39 by educational districts throughout the state. It includes 23 policy recommendations, including proposed standard language for bond measures that would end deceptive language criticized by the Solano County Grand Jury in its report about Measure Q.
In the meantime, Solano College has borrowed $51,810,000 to get started with its Student/Veterans’ Affordable Education, Job Training, Classroom Repair. Voters approved it.
July 25, 2015
The Reporter
By Kevin Dayton, researcher on municipal bond finance for the California Policy Center

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