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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