Alameda Unified School District
The Alameda Unified School District (AUSD) serves the City of Alameda, CA. It enrolls roughly 9,700 students each year with an average daily attendance (ADA) of roughly 95% and has a general fund budget of roughly $85 million.
AUSD and Redevelopment
The redevelopment mechanism provides for a portion of your tax dollars which get taken by redevelopment to be 'passed-through' to the local school district to maintain educational facilities.
On his website AUSD board member Mike McMahon suggests that the existing 1991 agreement between the City of Alameda Community Improvement Commission and the Alameda Unified School District provides pass-through money to AUSD only for the purpose of constructing housing. This is not correct.
(The 1991 CIC-AUSD agreement resulted from the Guyton lawsuit against the City of Alameda, and subsequent settlement.)
The 1991 CIC-AUSD agreement clearly creates a District Housing Fund, for housing, and a Capital Outlay Fund to pay for "part or all of the cost of land and/or certain capital improvements, including school-related buildings, facilties and improvements incidental thereto, and improvements to existing buildings and facilities which are determined....to meet the requirements of the Community Redevelopment Law." In the agreement, see Recitals Section I, and Section 2. (capital outlay) and Section 3. (housing fund.) Mr. McMahon needs to stop asserting that the current redevelopment pass-through agreement allows only housing to be built.
This is consistent with state law, providing for redevelopment funds to be passed-through to the local school district to maintain our schools. One can look for onself at California Education Code Section 42238.5 and see that redevelopment funds can be used for "educational facilities." (We suggest using this database to look up the codes.)
Then one can look at the definitions within the Education Code, in California Education Code Section 94110 and see that the law defines "educational facility" to include classrooms and academic buildings.
In March of 2004, voters approved 'Measure C' and AUSD issued $63 million in general obligation bonds, the proceeds of which are to "renovate aging neighborhood schools; construct, equip, upgrade classroom facilities, and sites..." Those bonds represent debt that Alameda taxpayers are now re-paying - It shows up on your tax bill in the "Tax-Rate Breakdown" section, under Voter Approved Debt Service: School Unified. By how much could that debt have been reduced by paying for these renovations with monies that are supposed to be passed-through from the Alameda Reuse and Redevelopment Authority for the purpose of renovating educational facilities?
The pass-through money does not show up on AUSD's books. Instead, as per the 1991 agreement, the Community Improvement Commission deposits the funds into an account the Commission, i.e. the City of Alameda, manages on behalf of the school board. It's a neat trick to keep assets of the AUSD books to make the agency look poorer than it is, because our officials know they can always rally parents and teachers to support new taxes to support the schools. As of the time of this writing, we have an outstanding request to the City of Alameda to get the balance of both the District Housing Fund and the District Capital Outlay fund, and identify where in the City of Alameda's financial documents, these funds are reported. To our knowledge, AUSD has never tapped either of these funds to either build housing, or maintain our schools.
If AUSD had been using redevelopment pass-through money from the District Capital Outlay fund to maintain our schools, the $63 million Measure C bond issue in 2004 might have been for a smaller amount, meaning your tax bill would be smaller, and you would have more money in your pocket today to support a new parcel tax to supplement the loss of the state money we are facing.