With the unveiling of its Plan B, Let Duluth Vote certainly provided Duluth an alternative to addressing the Duluth school district's infrastructure needs.
The citizen group tasked with the development of the long-range facilities plan started with a driving question: How can Duluth provide a facility infrastructure that meets the equity, health, educational, and student space needs decades into the future within a financially sound framework?
Let Duluth Vote's driving mission seems to be to maintain the current three K-12 school corridor buildings, with other considerations secondary to that. Plan B would cost taxpayers more than the long-range facilities plan on a monthly basis over 20 years. It ignores maintenance expected during years 10 through 20, yet completely spends the maintenance budgets during those years on bond repayment. It spends nearly $2 million restructuring already issued bonds for their alternative uses.
Plan B would spend $10 million to patch up schools that will be abandoned or destroyed within 10 years. The Let Duluth Vote plan would bring older buildings up to minimum safety code threshold, without any consideration of these older buildings' equity, health, or educational needs and challenges.
According to the Let Duluth Vote presentation, Duluth faces a choice. For the same tax impact, do we want a plan with a total project cost of $400 million that provides real long-term solutions and provides our students equitable, healthy, and educationally appropriate buildings? Or do we want a project with total cost of more than $300 million that initially wastes more than $12 million, defers known long-term maintenance needs without a means to pay for them and ignores issues of air quality, equity, and educational adequacy?
ADVERTISEMENT
Even the professionals who helped draft Plan B were clear in their assessment of what is truly a better deal for our community.
Paul Goossens
Duluth
