A Blueprint for Disaster: The Saga Continues

Karlo Silbiger

(This posting is a continuation of the article that can be found here)

On Tuesday night, in the final meeting for outgoing board members Steve Gourley and Scott Zeidman, the School Board approved four projects for renovation, using the $12 million of Capital Improvement funding, which had been sitting untouched in accounts for far too long. These four projects should be of no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to school district discussions since they were all first proposed almost a decade ago, and have been discussed ad nauseum by the current board since January. I wrote about all four in last week’s posting. It was time to approve them and the support among the board and audience was unanimous.

However, after taking that worthy vote, the board also approved a budget allocation for all four projects which added up to over $16 million of government funding. $16 million is a lot of money, regardless of the circumstances, and a vote like that should only be taken when all questions are answered and when all people are heard. It is always suspicious when a decision of this magnitude is made at the very last meeting of a lame duck board, especially when at least one of the incoming members has spoken publically about the inherent problems with the funding process.

Some members of the public, staff, and even elected board members have said that we have spent enough time on this issue, that a decision has to be made. I will give you athat, I am as tired of talking about this issue as you are of hearing me talk! However, the problem with this issue has not been time, but transparency. Last week, I took responsibility for how badly this school board, of which I am a member, has screwed up what should have been the most joyous of times in our community: surplus government money. The vote was tainted because of three M’s: Misinformation, Missed Opportunities, and Mistrust.

Misinformation
While the board has held numerous public hearings on these projects since January, giving staff a forum to update us of their plans and all in attendance a chance to ask questions, most of the requests for information have yet to be answered. One board member brought a file to the meeting Tuesday in order to demonstrate how much paper has been produced about this issue. However, all who work in project management know that the measure of readiness is not time spent or paper replicated, it’s questions answered. Had staff answered the questions posed to them by members of the public six months ago, we could have moved on at that point. Since they didn’t (and still haven’t), it is inappropriate to allocate government funds.

There are three primary questions that have been asked repeatedly and still have not been answered:

1. How are the $16 million in government funds allocated on Tuesday going to be used? Believe it or not, the Board allocated these funds with no budget, not even an outline of how the money is being spent. I compared it to a teacher assigning a student a grade of “B+” on the first day of school with no evidence yet of their academic performance. We have a responsibility to the taxpayers of this community to ensure that every dollar is accounted for and with not even a budget estimation, we have lost that trust.


2. What is the cost-benefit analysis for each project? Over half of the money ($8.5 million) was allocated for a new athletic complex at the middle school/high school. Originally, one of the incentives of spending this money was that it would make that area more presentable, and therefore more desirable to potential renters. Later on, members of the board suggested that renting this facility might not be worthwhile. Public schools in California are in a terrible budget crisis. Should the financial gain available with each project single-handedly determine its funding level? Of course not. But it is information that the board and community should have before making funding decisions.


3. For which projects can we legally use state modernization grant monies? Originally, our staff said that only some of our projects were eligible for state matching grants, and they encouraged allocation with that regulation in mind. We have since found out that this information was inaccurate. How can decisions be made when the basis for those decisions turned out to be false?

This is not fiscal conservatism, but financial common sense. We are not getting this much money for many more years, so we have to ensure that we spend it in the most fiduciarily responsible manner. We need accurate answers, ideally before decisions were made.

Missed Opportunities
I have become a strong believer in the idea that a good process will almost always lead to a good result, and that a good process is one that notifies and involves the most people possible. That doesn’t mean that the elected officials turn over decision-making power to the voting majority, but it means that they listen. We have a lot of passionate stakeholders interested in participating in this process, but they were only included in a meaningful way in October and November (when workshops were held for two of these projects), nearly a year too late. Neighbors in the Vets Park area surrounding the school were only notified of these projects one month ago and students, the beneficiaries of any project, still have not had a meaningful say.

There are two problems with conducting a process in this manner. First, it alienates those who should be supporters. Instead of working together to determine the best way forward, every meeting regarding these projects have become tense, mean-spirited, and angry. Parents have insulted each other and students have been brought in as props. Second, it causes us to lose an incredibly valuable resource in producing the best possible projects. Many of our stakeholders have knowledge that we don’t. We should be thanking them for their work, not discouraging participation. We can do better.

Mistrust
The final “M” is mistrust, a strong, but I think appropriate, word. On Tuesday, it became clear that our staff and board hired an architect for over $400,000 to design the new athletic complex with no formal bidding process, no request for proposals (to ensure that the most qualified candidate was hired), and no open discussion about the hiring process. They based their decision on a nine year old selection process, in which any and all paperwork illuminating this firm's qualifications has been lost or destroyed. It is unclear whether or not this is legal, but honestly it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, the purpose for the regulations related to the fair and open hiring of professional service contracts was put into place to preserve the public trust that their money was being spent on above board transactions. I don’t think we have a “Bell” type situation at CCUSD, but I know that it is just these types of questionable practices which lead honorable governments downward, a direction that I will fight vigorously in my community.

This is not over. A new board will take their seats on December 13th and I will insist that we work immediately to correct as many of these mistakes as is possible. We will gather answers to the above questions, hear from the public in a meaningful way, create a bidding process which restores public trust, and then use that information to allocate the public’s money in the most appropriate manner. It is time for us to clean up our collective mess.

Karlo Silbiger is the Co-Editor of the Culver City Progress Blog, the Vice-President of the Culver City School Board, and the President of the Culver City Democratic Club.