Using $17m in Jefferson County School Funds to Build an Olympic Natatorium for the City of Arvada is a Horrible Idea
With little or no public awareness, a proposal has been making it way through Jeffco schools to have the district use somewhere between $17 and $35 million in county taxpayers’ money (more with interest) to build an Olympic Natatorium in West Arvada to replace the current Meyers Pool. This proposal will be up for a vote on the May 6thschool board agenda. Let me explain why this is a horrible idea and you should immediately contact school board members to voice your opposition to it.
First, what’s an Olympic Natatorium? While lanes at your local recreation center’s pool are 25 meters long, this one will have 50 meter lanes. It will also have a separate diving well, and spa pool for divers to warm up in — just like you see on the Olympics, along with locker rooms and separate seating areas for fans and competitors. If Arvada bids for the summer Olympics, they’ll be in good shape.
The district claims that swim teams from nearby high schools will use the facility ten percent of the time (which seems high, given the school year is only 37 weeks and men’s and women’s swimming seasons take up only two thirds of the school year).
But despite the school district paying half the cost of the Olympic Natatorium, those teams will still have to pay a fee to use it. Just like every resident of Jefferson County who will be paying for it with their (school) tax dollars.
The district claims that Arvada will pay half the cost of the pool, even though in 2018 its city council already refused to put a bond issue on the ballot to replace the Meyers Pool.
Jeffco further claims that the school district will pay its half the cost (or perhaps more, if Arvada can’t raise the funds) by issuing Certificates of Participation (a form of debt that doesn’t have to be approved by voters) and repaying their principal and interest out of the Capital Fund.
Let me explain what that really means.
Every year, Jeffco receives a billion dollars in revenue from various sources. Most of them go into the General Fund, which is used to compensate teachers and other staff, and buy curriculum and instructional resources for classrooms, and pay for extraordinary expenses related to recovering pandemic related learning losses and mental health issues.
However, funds are transferred every year from the General Fund to the Capital Fund. Over the past decade, this annual transfer has averaged $22 million. The $705 million Prop 5B Capital Plan approved by voters in 2018 was supposed to be paid for with $567 in bond funds and annual transfers to the Capital Fund of $23 million per year for six years.
Except Jeffco forgot to diclose that of this $23 million, $2.1 million per year was already committed to repaying Certificates of Participation (COPs) that Jeffco had previously issued. So the planned transfer to the Capital Fund available for the Capital Improvement Program is already $12.6 million short.
Steve Bell, Jeffco’s Chief Operating Officer, now wants to further increase the annual transfer from the General Fund to the Capital Fund to pay for the Olympic Natatorium. Not just for one year, but for the twenty required to pay off the COPs. That means less General Fund money for employee compensation, curriculum, and instructional resources for our kids.
Of course, Bell could change his mind and decide to pay for the Natatorium out of the proceeds of the bonds issued for the Capital Program. That would truly be ugly.
But that’s not scheduled to happen until the end of 2024.
That very sensible policy was put in place to ensure that the original scope of work promised to Jeffco voters when Prop 5B was approved in 2018 will be completed before any Capital Improvement Program funds are spent on any other projects.
But $55 million has already been spent on athletic facilities that weren’t disclosed to voters in 2018 during the Prop 5B campaign, including this magnificent new turf field for the affluent students at West Jefferson Middle School. Does your kids’ middle school field look like this? Does your kids’ high school field even look like this?
It seems clear that the original (prudent) policy has been abandoned. Was Capital Advisory Committe member Tom Murray aware of this change when he assured the Board of Education that no projects not disclosed to the voters during the 2018 Prop 5B campaign would be undertaken until all the promised projects had been completed?
When will Jeffco citizens be told that there is now a risk that some projects promised to the voters in 2018 will never be completed?
And who approved this critical policy change? Not the Jeffco Board of Education. And the Capital Asset Advisory Committee has no authority to approve such a policy change. So who approved the change? Steve Bell, perhaps?
The original Capital Program budget included an $86 million contingency for cost overruns in excess of the 10% contingency on each project. That $86 million has been exhausted by cost overruns and over $50 million in spending on athletic facilities that were never disclosed to voters during the Prop 5B campaign (remember, the 2016 bond issue failed in part because voters objected to more than $30 million of proposed spending on athletic facilities).
The current Capital Program’s cost overruns and spending on undisclosed projects now total more than $107 million after just two years of a six year plan. They are now being paid for out of the $118 million in bond premium the district received (in addition to the planned $567 million) because of the sharp fall in interest rates since 2018. $21 million in bond premium has already been used, and $97 million remains.
This is money that has many other possible uses (like making the planned upgrades to schools with a high percentage of free/reduced lunch eligible students that the district has delayed, or building school additions to eliminate the need for modular classrooms).
In most other districts, the use of any bond premium (which represents an unexpected inflow of cash for capital projects) is logically decided by the board. But in Jeffco, Steve Bell decides — and he may decide to use it to build an Olympic Natatorium in affluent West Arvada.
If they could vote on it, I don’t believe for a second that Jeffco citizens who don’t live in Arvada, who have all paid for their own recreation districts’ pools and other facilities, would agree to have the taxes they pay to the school district taken out of our children’s classrooms and used to build an Olympic Natatorium for the people of Arvada.
Moreover, if the Natatorium is approved by the Jeffco Board of Education, no recreation district (e.g., Foothills and Evergreen) or city (e.g., Golden, Lakewood, and Wheat Ridge) will ever again be able to pass a rec facilities bond issue, as voters will reasonably demand that the school district pay for half the cost, just as it did in the sweet deal they gave Arvada. In effect, Jeffco Schools will become the permanent funding partner for every recreation facility in Jefferson County, with a growing stream of money coming out of our classrooms for this purpose.
These are the foreseeable negative consequences that will occur unless the people of Jeffo tell the school board “No Way!”
Time will tell whether they’ll listen.
PS: If you’d like another perspective on why the Olympic Natatorium is a bad idea, Bob Greenawalt has written about it on his website (ImproveJeffcoSchools.org), and posted this excellent YouTube video). Bob is a retired Army Colonel, West Point grad (engineering), University of Pennsylvania grad (Masters in engineering and business administration), Project Management Certificate holder from the Project Management Institute (equivalent to a CPA for accountants) and former chief technology officer of a number of companies.
Tom Coyne is a business executive, former member of the Jeffco District Accountability Committee, and former Chair of the Wheat Ridge High School Accountability Committee. His wife, Susan Miller, was elected to the Jeffco Board of Education in November 2019. These are solely Coyne’s views.
