The Pampa Independent School District school bond for Propositions A and B was passed officially on Saturday, May 6th. The election results will be signed in to order Wednesday, May 10th. PISD sent out the following statement following the closing of the polls on May 6th:
Pampa ISD voters passed Proposition A & B of the proposed 2023 Bond with 59 percent approving the $130 million package to address aging facilities, safety and security, and career and technical education.
The approved bond package for Proposition A provides funding to construct a new replacement Career and Technology Education facility and additions and renovations at Travis Elementary. Proposition B authorizes the board to sell bonds in the future to fund these projects when property tax growth increases. One hundred percent of the cost would be covered by industry and energy.
The election brought more than 2,200 voters to the polls.
“We are so blessed to have the support of our Pampa ISD community,” said Superintendent Hugh Piatt. “This bond passage will help us effectively address several issues we’ve been experiencing for years.”
Proposition A includes a new Travis Elementary school. Built-in 1959, the current campus is undersized and outdated. A new addition will house 4th and 5th graders. The original Travis Elementary building will be renovated once the new addition is complete.
The state of Texas doesn’t provide funding for facilities. By law, bond funds may not be used to fund daily operating expenses or salaries. Bond funds may only be used for projects approved by district voters.
“It’s left up to the community to find a way to build new schools or expand existing schools when faced with these issues,” said Piatt. “We’ve worked hard to manage funds conservatively and will continue to be good stewards for the Pampa ISD community.”
The District has a record of actively managing its outstanding debt to achieve savings for taxpayers. Approximately 69% percent of outstanding voted bond debt service (principal and interest) will be repaid within the next 10 years – well above the state average.
The district will now get to work on the next steps and begin coordinating with architects to conduct a competitive bidding process for each project, as well as finalizing a construction schedule and working with district financial advisors to establish a bond program schedule.
“We’re grateful to our community for all the support they provide to our schools, our students, and staff,” said Piatt.“This is a wonderful community that I’m proud to serve.”
Throughout the months following the announcement till election day, ‘Letters to the Editor’ poured in, showcasing both sides. Some points made from one letter of a long-time Pampa resident:
• It is a two-part bond issue being part A at a 62 million dollar face value and part B at a 68 million dollar face value. If you understand the PISD advertising, we are not supposed to pay for proposition B but, the new industry and energy industry will pay for it. Proposition A being valued at 62 million dollars will total $125,891,071 after the bond company interest of $65,891,071 is added to the face value. The bond interest rate is supposed to be 4.57% to mature in 30 years. The tax impact annually will be $50,000 home/ $108.42, $100,000 home/$216.83, $125,000 home/$271.04, $200,000 home/$433.66, and a home of $250,000/$542.08.
• ... the total debt that will be owed if the bond passes will be $168,218,369 (one-hundred sixty-eight million, two hundred eighteen thousand, three hundred sixty-eight dollars) as of this writing. There are several good elements to these bonds: some maybe not so much! There is one element that some parts seem fairly good but, overall it appears to be a modified redo of a 2015, failed bond that was rejected by the voters. Regarding the overall debt, sometimes there can be some early pay-off of some debt thereby lowering the cost somewhat. These figures are true and correct as far as known now. As was stated early on, this is provided for additional fiscal information not to have you vote for or against this bond issue.
Another resident brought forth the argument, “We are told the status of many of our schools is very poor, but whose fault is that? Had previous boards and administrations done their jobs this problem possibly would not have become so unacceptable. But that is in the past, and now we are being asked to bail out that situation with a mammoth bond issue ... According to one rating service, out of 965 school districts in Texas, PISD ranks 722, the bottom third.”
After the announcement of the bond, a political action committee, Bonded Together and Building Together, was formed. The public committee through itself into showcasing benefits to the community for the passage of the bond. Collin Rains was Co-Chairman of the committee. In a previous article ran in The Pampa News, Rains stated “This committee is made up of people who have students in the school district and some that don’t ... We want to see growth and advancement for our students in Pampa but we know that there is a concern with what this bond would mean for homeowners.”
The bond passed with 59%, with roughly 2,200 voters casting their votes. So was the school district weary of the outcome?
“Worried or weary isn’t the word. The best part of living in a democracy is that you don’t know what the outcome will be,” PISD Superintendent, Hugh Piatt said. “The point was to get out enough information for people to make an informed vote on election day. We put out the information on social media platforms and flyers, and we did a show on the radio every week. We visited over 30 civic clubs and tried to provide as much information as people wanted. All of that was just to get enough informative information to the voters. For our ISD voters, we have 20% of the voters going to the polls. We got a good turnout from the election.”
Now with the marching orders, the ISD is ready to go into the next step. Despite the outcome, the ISD’s main goal was to bring as many people to the polls as possible to see where our district voters stand. The ISD has architects on standby, ready to begin the next process, along with financial advisors. To go back to the mentioned argument, the debt we are already in, why go for more?
“The why is that a bond is the only avenue for school districts to build anything new,” Piatt said. “The only way to get a bond is for residents to vote on it. 126 districts were going out for bonds this May, so we weren’t the only ones. The only way to keep up with growth, or in our case, to replace failing and old facilities required us to go out for a bond. There are regulations on everything, we can’t overextend ourselves. We went out for 120 million, but we can’t do all 120 million right now because we can’t over-tax our residents, by the state law. We can do 62 million dollars worth of work, then the rest can happen once our tax base increases. Or if we pay off the debt to the junior high or admin building quicker, those would allow us to continue with our next phase. Looking at it, we aren’t 200 million in debt, we have 30 million that is being paid off, we just incurred 62, so we’re 92 million in debt. The debt our school district has, compared to others that look like us, we are in the lower or middle range of debt. But again, this is the only way to make improvements.”
This May, out of the school districts that went out for bonds, there was $24,876,000,000 worth of bonds were sought after. A mixture of facility upgrades or renovations from across the Texas school districts.
“I was happy about the process of the bond, we were able to get enough information out there and people to the polls,” Piatt said. “Now we’ve got some direction. Let the work begin, there’s a lot more hard work to be done.”
Referring back to the mention of where Pampa ISD ranks low in the over Texas ISD, so does the bond aid in helping our ranking?
“This will make our schools more attractive to people coming to our area,” Piatt said. “It is not just good for the students current, but for the ones coming. As well as our community, if our schools are vibrant, then they attract other people and businesses into our community. It’s not just for the immediate, it’s for the future. Now we’ve got a direction to do that, and to do it right. To continue to live within our means, we are going to do more when the opportunity comes.”
The PAC (Political Action Committee) took up the torch and helped raise awareness in favor of the bond.
“The PAC isn’t something I can be part of as the superintendent, and I can only present factual information,” Piatt said. “They worked exceptionally hard, all of them. They spoke at every place I went and spoke at, presenting benefits and opinions that I couldn’t. The committee has so many people from our community that have full-time jobs and lives and still took this challenge on, they were a huge help in getting the information. I believe they changed a lot of no votes to yes because of how much information and questions they could provide an answer to. They did an excellent job in many different ways.”
The campaign was a clean one, by many accounts. There were opinions on both sides, but it never came to a drag-out fight over how one person felt. What happens next is important now that the bond has passed.
“Now we meet with our architect and develop a timeline,” Piatt said. “We will begin the design process for the CTE and Travis Elementary and will use that information to start the process. In the next 6-9 months we should be breaking ground. We had comments made that before the bond had passed we’d already started breaking ground, but that wasn’t the case. We were extending the drop-off drives at Lamar and Travis, just like we did at Austin the year before. It was simply doing the work we’d done at Austin.”
A lot of concerns raised were that the money wouldn’t be appropriately used. That although the bond was laid out in bullet points, the plans would now change and the money wasn’t going to what was promised.
“I go back to why we have a bond attorney/council, is so that when we lay the language and advertising, it all goes through legal case,” Piatt said. “Now that the bond has passed, we are held to the words we said would be done. So when we start spending money, it will go into the projects that were promised. We can’t spend more than 62 million, that’s all we have to use and use as promised. Our trust in the community is a big thing, so with this bond, they can trust that they will see construction beginning soon, and the dollars promised to be spent will be spent where we stated it would go. We can do 62 million right now for the projects we announced, but all the money spent comes from our legal counsel and a bond underwriter that tells us the process of selling the bonds. It’s a team of people that will advise us every step of the way. We’ve got financial advisors, underwriters, and legal council tracking and advising every step we take. This isn’t about putting money in our pockets, we did this to help kids and the community. The chance we have now is to do that and that is all we’re focused on. The money will be followed and accounted for on paper to the penny. It all goes to what we passed the bond to pay for. We can’t pay salaries, give bonuses or stipends or anything like that from the bond, the bond money is all accounted for by these companies who have advised us on what to do. We also have an auditor that comes out and goes through all of our books, and if anything is missing or not done right, we get hit. For the past several years, our audit rating has been 100%.”
There are always people that will try to cheat the system or do things incorrectly or illegally, the ISD has no plans to be those people.
“We plan to be as transparent as we can,” Piatt said. “We are using the money how it’s supposed to be. The State of Texas has strict restrictions, to avoid fraud, and we aren’t going to do anything to make poor decisions with what we’ve been trusted to do.”
Now with the bond passed, the committees for Travis and the CTE building at the high school will meet and ground will be broken in the coming months. The school district will do what they’ve been entrusted to do in the right way, with all money tracked to the penny. All documents on money are public records and open to the public to ask the Administration to view. The projected goal would be to have facilities done and ready for move-in by the ‘25-’26 school years.
