Jurupa Unified Seeking $180M In Bonds With Measure V

This November, voters in the Jurupa Unified School District will be asked whether or not to approve Measure V, a $180 million bond package that will be used to address safety and security across the district.

“It could be replacing the existing chain link fence with a higher, taller wrought iron fence,” Paula Ford, assistant superintendent of Business Services, said. “We know for sure that it’s adding cameras across the district.”

Ford said those cameras would not only be located within the school facilities, but also around the perimeter and other outside areas to be able to monitor not only what’s happening inside the facilities, but also surrounding them as well.

In addition, she said the bond would be used to determine how to best ensure that each campus in the district has a single point of entry that will allow people to enter the campus when needed while keeping students and staff safe.

“Cameras will be placed in all of our schools and fencing will be addressed where it needs to be addressed,” Ford said. “As far as the single point of entry, that will likely be the schools that will be getting modernization, because we’ll be making changes to make sure that that flow is into one single point of entry.”

Prior to heading out for bond, the district conducted two rounds of polling, one last fall and one this past spring, that both found voters were in support of the bond measure.

“The initial results of that survey came back with like a 65% approval,” Ford said, noting that the results were similar in both the fall and spring. “Of course, after you do some opposing arguments, that does drop, but it still stayed above that 55% threshold, so that’s why we recommended that the board make the decision to go forward with the bond.”

Voters previously approved the Measure EE in 2014, which provided the district with $144 million that was used to improve safety and security, repair aging facilities and upgrade career training and instructional technology, improve vocational facilities, science and computer labs.

“We actually touched every school with at least something,” Ford said. “We had not passed a bond before that since like 2001, and it was a very small bond at the time.”

When it comes to property taxes, the district is asking voters to approve a levy of up to $40 for every $100,000 in assessed value for all residential, commercial and industrial properties. Ford said the average property owner would see an increase of approximately $125 per year.

“One of the things that we always do is we always look for opportunities to do any type of refinancing of our outstanding bonds,” Ford said. “So with Measure EE, we were able to refinance…and reduce the taxpayers’ cost.”

Ford said the district would continue to look for opportunities to decrease the taxpayer burden in terms of repaying the bonds, both for Measure EE and Measure V if it passes this November.

She said now is the right time for this bond because the district is close to exhausting its Measure EE funds, but still has a number of projects that need to be done to maintain its facilities.

“We have over $300 million in needs in the district…and projects are not going to get less expensive,” Ford said. “We know we need to continue to provide for all of our schools and all of our students, and in order to do that, we know we need to be able to access these funds.”