The recount for Beaumont Unified School District’s Measure E election officially ended today with the same result as before: The $148 million bond initiative failed.
“It would be misleading if I didn’t say that we were a little bit disappointed that Measure E didn’t pass,” Thomas Guzowski, public information officer for the district, said in an interview with The Riverside Record. “That said, we now have to kind of proceed forward the best way that we can looking at what we can do with less resources, in essence.”
Guzowski said the district initially decided to call for a recount, which started Dec. 13, so there was “complete, absolute confidence in the outcome.” Following the recount, he said that every voter should feel assured that the election process works, there’s integrity in it and that their votes were counted.
The original results for Measure E showed 13,165 votes in favor of the bonds, or 53.12%, and 11,619 against the bonds, or 46.88%, about 1.9% shy of the required 55% supermajority needed for the measure to pass.
The recount results showed 13,169 votes in favor of the bonds, or 53.15%, and 11,609 votes against the bonds, or 46.85%, still leaving the district more than 1.8% shy of what the bonds needed to pass. The total cost of the recount was not immediately known, but it was estimated that it would cost the district $10,302 per day.
“The district was seeking $148 million and that is to support a lot of different issues, including overcrowding, leaking roofs, aging plumbing, aging portables, so there’s really a lot of money on the line,” Guzowski said ahead of the recount. “If the results don’t change, those things aren’t going to just go away, so there’s a lot at stake.”
Now, with the recount completed, Guzowski said the district is splitting the project list from the bond effort into two buckets: one for immediate needs and one for the wants.
“We have immediate needs, things that are around critical maintenance, that are just going to have to be addressed, and the money is just going to have to be found somewhere,” he said. “Those are things that we’re not going to shirk away from, even if that means that there’s going to be something else that has to be surrendered.”
Stay up to date with the latest from The Record. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter today!
As for the wants and the more long-term projects that can be pushed further down the road, Guzowski said the superintendent, cabinet and staff will have to work together to come up with a new plan.
“Perhaps preparing or looking at moving forward with efforts to have another bond in the future, to, in essence, obtain the needed funding for the district,” he said. “And I think it’s so important for voters and the public to just really, really understand that this is really the primary way schools are funded.”
Sara Hinkley, the California Program Manager for the Center for Cities + Schools at the University of California, Berkeley, called the funding mechanism for school facilities “the most regressive form of funding in the education system,” in an interview with The Record earlier this year.
“California did a lot of work, partly in response to lawsuits, to restructure how overall education funding is done, so that it’s not reliant on local property values,” she said. “And school facility funding is still the way we did it, you know, 100 years ago. It’s still all based on local property tax.”
Before district staff make any decisions on a potential future bond initiative, Guzowski said they would first look at what went right with this effort, what went wrong and how they can better educate voters about how bonds work and why they’re necessary.
The last bond approved by Beaumont Unified voters was Measure Z in 2008, which provided the district with $125 million in local dollars that the state matched dollar for dollar. With that money, the district was able to build three new schools and invest $90 million into the district’s only high school.
Beaumont Unified Chief Business Official Sergio San Martin previously told The Record that the facilities master plan shows that the district will need more than a billion dollars in the next 15 to 20 years to address the district’s aging facilities and population growth.
The Riverside Record is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet providing Riverside County with high-quality journalism free of charge. We’re able to do this because of the generous donations of supporters like you!