Community considering high school updates

By ALEX STRICKLANDBigfork Eagle

With only days to go before school bond ballots are due back to the Bigfork School District Office, Bigfork is considering whether to pass an $11.1 million bond that was voted down in October.Ballots are due to the district office — not just postmarked — by Tuesday, March 4. The high school bond was narrowly defeated in an election last fall where the $5.5 million elementary school bond was approved. The bond for the elementary school was officially sold a few weeks ago and construction planning is already under way.Tax confusionSchool officials said that there was much confusion surrounding the proper way to determine taxable value during the last election and have sought to clear up any misconceptions. Bigfork Citizen Advocates United for Students Education, a group formed after the first bond's failure to promote the issue, put out a table outlining estimates of the impact of the bond to homeowners' property taxes for a variety of home values. The way to calculate the impact is to take the "Taxable Value" from your most recent Flathead or Lake County property tax statement and multiply that number by .03658. The product is the annual tax increase of the bond. School Board Trustee Denny Sabo recently pointed out that because of dropping interest rates, that number will actually be lower than estimated, sicne all estimates were compiled assuming a 5-percent ineterest rate and the elementary school bond was recently sold at a rate of just 3.45-percent. That differece for the $5.5 million bond will save about $800,000 over its 15 year life, while an identical interest rate for the $11.1 million high school bond would net about $1.5 million in savings over the life of the bond. Return to senderBecause stringent rules surrounding a mail-in ballot election prohobit ballots from being forwarded by the post office, the district office has recieved 868 ballots back due to incorrect address information.All address information comes from the Flathead and Lake County elections offices, but many people haven't updated their information and it has become innaccurate or they are snowbirds whose mail is being forwarded to a winter address. Even if the post office has a forwarding address, the ballot will be returned to the district office.Ballots were mailed on Feb. 14 and should have been receievd sometime the following week, District Business Manager Eda Taylor said. If any voters living within the District 38 boundaries have not yet recieved a ballot, they should contact the office at 837-7400 immediately to obtain one.Taylor said the number of undeliverable ballots is up sharply from last fall's election because the district and post office were unaware of the forwarding rules and so ballots were delivered if an accurate address was on file at the post office. Taylor said the school district was sending letters to voters whose mail is forwarded to inform them of the situation and give them a chance to call the district to get their ballot. The high school bond was defeated by only 84 votes, and because it is a mail-in election, a simple majority is all that is required. As of Tuesday, Feb. 26, 1,816 of the 5,260 ballots had been turned in. Joint libraryOf the $11.1 million included in the high school bond, $200,000 of that is earmarked for a joint community/high school library to act as both the school's library and a branch of the Flathead County Library. After plans for a new library at Potoczny Park failed to make it past the Bigfork Parks Advisory Board, a plan was proposed for a joint use library based on such models that have been met with success in other communities such as Saint Ignatius.Advocates for the bondBCAUSE, the group formed to advocate the bond, has spoken to community groups and tried to answer questions and correct misconceptions about the bond, according to Mary Knoll, who is spearheading the group.During the last bond election, the role of informing the public fell to Superintendent Russ Kinzer and his office. The District office, however, is legally forbidden from taking an official stance on the issue so Kinzer was limited to a strictly informative capacity.Knoll said phone trees and mailers sent to each post office customer in the school district have had a good response so far."A critical piece was that we truly learned that last time we did not address getting straightforward, complete, thorough yet understandable information about the bond to people," she said.Knoll said the phone tree will continue to make calls right up until election day.