Tulsa Public Schools wants Tulsa property owners to approve $414,000,000.00 in new taxes for a bond issue on June 8. This is an enormous amount of money – coming close to half billion dollars.

When the Legislature decided that schools could borrow money through bonds, the idea was to use those funds for long-term projects, like classrooms and administration buildings. The public schools got greedy and the Oklahoma Supreme Court helped them expand that to items like books, computer programs, buses, consulting, bond fees and a lot more. These are items that should come out of the general budget, not a bond issue.

If schools were operated in a fiscally conservative manner, they would have a sinking fund and each year they would put aside a certain percentage of revenues for maintenance.

Instead, administrators and board members want to borrow as much as they can as often as they can.

And despite what the school boards, or the media or administrators says, this is a new tax. The old tax expired. This is new. If it were not new, why does it need to be voted on?

It takes a lot of money to run schools. Buildings run down. Personnel costs grow. Revenues can dip. But Tulsa Public Schools has a declining student population. TPS has already combined some schools and closed others. Those classrooms were not needed.

And because of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, in-class attendance rates have been dropping and possibly inflated because state funding hinges on attendance.

Finally, Tulsa Public Schools should schedule bond elections in November, not on June 8 when kids are out of school and families are on vacation. This is a strategic move to heighten the impact of teacher votes and teacher union support. They like low turnouts when they raise taxes.

Tulsa needs to head back to the drawing board for this boondoggle. It is too much borrowing for the wrong projects for a hasty bond issue in a poorly timed election.

Vote no on June 8.