To hear the Hamilton County Board of Education discuss it, it sounded a lot like blackmail.
We’re referring to the amendment to its 2023-2024 budget the board signed off on at its meeting Thursday night. The amendment removed $6 million for deferred maintenance from the schools’ budget to be used instead in an upcoming bond issue.
By doing so, Deputy Hamilton County Mayor Tucker McClendon told board members, the schools would reap a minimum of $60 million for deferred maintenance projects.
School board officials, almost to a member, originally balked at the suggestion, and especially since Superintendent Dr. Justin Robertson suggested the possibility existed that if the board did not agree to the change it might be looking at a budget reduction of nearly $20 million.
“It’s a great risk,” he said.
When all the complaints had been heard, the board voted 8-2 to pass an amendment that would remove the $6 million pending an inter-local agreement the Hamilton County Commission would accept guaranteeing that bond proceeds from the $6 million would go toward the deferred maintenance board members intended it to.
In truth, the $6 million was a compromise that Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp and Robertson worked out that would placate some county commissioners who thought the sizable $19-plus million in growth money that might have been given to the schools — the nearly $20 million to which Robertson referred — was too much.
(The county is only obligated to give the schools no less than they received this year.)
The $6 million would then be a part of a much larger bond issue later this year or early next year that not only would cover the cost of large-ticket maintenance items like roofs, windows and heating and air conditioning systems for existing schools but also new schools and other capital projects.
Wamp suggested to think of a 15-year bond issue as a home mortgage. The school system would get the money up front to pay for the most needed deferred maintenance items (as the home seller would get the money for a house). Then the county would pay back the bond issuer over time (as a mortgagee would the bank for its new home loan).
“It’s a pretty good start” to what the MTG Consulting Group estimated was nearly a billion dollars of maintenance issues, the mayor told this page Friday, “Instead of nibbling at the edges” with $6 million, “it knocks out” a big chunk of the items much sooner.
Not only that, Wamp said, he assured Robertson that if “any sort of emergency” for the schools came up, the county could give them a pro-rated amount from the money from the bond issue. Plus, he said, the school district has a “sizable fund balance” from which it can draw.
“Nobody’s missing a meal,” he said.
Wamp said he drew on his familiarity with the work of Knox County officials to help craft the compromise. There, he said, in a district not too much different from Hamilton County, the county and the school board annually work out how much growth money the district will receive.
Robertson, while suggesting what sounded to us like blackmail, nevertheless tried to emphasize to school board members that the amendment still gave them everything they sought — a 5% raise for teachers, more behavioral professionals and much more.
“It allows us to execute every other piece of our plan,” he said. “The big rocks this board passed are still in the plan.”
Asked by a board member if the agreement was the right thing to do, Robertson said it was.
“This is in the best interests of the school system, based on the circumstances,” he said.
Robertson added that he couldn’t remember a board request to use money from its fund balance for an emergency need that wasn’t approved by the county commission, which holds the district education purse strings.
While Wamp assured there would be “no down side whatsoever” for the district with the amendment, Robertson and board members stressed they would make the public aware if for some reason the $6 million in maintenance money they intentionally put in the budget did not eventually come their way.
“If they don’t do it,” the superintendent said of the mayor and county commissioners, “it’s on them.”
“If you don’t honor your word, it’s not going to be a happy time,” board member Joe Wingate said.
“It’s a political stick-up,” said board member Ben Connor. “It’s garbage. It’s terrible. It’s playing politics.”
But if $6 million can be turned into $60 million by the end of the 2023-2024 school year, the naysayers may think differently.