Lack Of Communication Hurts Both City, Schools

What will be the result of dueling bond issues on the November ballot?

Talk to either Long Beach Unified School District officials or city of Long Beach officials, and they’ll tell you that’s asking the wrong question. Both entities desperately need to catch up on aging infrastructure and buildings, and both think they can justify a “little” bump in property taxes to the city’s voters.

Taken separately, we likely would agree. Fifty-year-old schools need to be replaced just as badly as 50-year-old libraries or community centers.

Notice how both needs deal with our children? That’s because there is plenty of overlap between the school district and the city when it comes to serving our youth.

Yet the fact that once again the powers that be at the school district and the city appear to be operating in a vacuum will jeopardize one, if not both, bonds.

The city appears to have the higher mountain to climb — it must earn a two-thirds majority to get its $571 million to rebuild the infrastructure. The good thing about that approach is that the voters will know exactly what their tax money will be going toward. The bad thing is that a fair percentage of the populace will vote no on any tax increase, no matter what it’s for.

The folks at LBUSD aren’t going to have a free ride, either. While it’s true that voters traditionally look more favorably on school bonds than other spending, $1.2 billion is a serious chunk of money. Getting even 55% of the voters to agree to that investment in this economy is going to be a trick.

With challenges like that, can someone explain why both entities persist in making it harder on themselves by refusing to communicate?

We’re not privy to whether Mayor Bob Foster was truly surprised last week by the announcement that the school district would put a bond issue on the November ballot, but surely he wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of selling his own bond to the City Council with that news hanging in the air.

This is just the latest example of policymakers at the city and LBUSD acting as if their counterpart didn’t exist. Everything from land use decisions to crossing guard assignments appear to be made unilaterally, with little communication, let alone coordination.

The idea of collaboration gets plenty of lip service, and there actually has been an occasional success — the partnership creating the ACE academy for technical education at Jordan High School comes to mind. But that is the exception rather than the rule.

City government and the local school district are pervasive parts of residents’ lives in any city. Taken separately, both entities in Long Beach compare favorably with any of their peers.

It’s the ability to work together where Long Beach falls short. Timing of bond issues is only the latest, and potentially most costly, of examples. In this time of diminishing resources, the school district and the city should be looking for ways to cooperatively share those resources.

We need to study the details of both bond issues before deciding what support we are willing to offer, but at first blush both seem to be more than justified based on need. Say what you want about decisions in the past to defer dealing with maintenance and replacement, the fact is, it needs to be done.

Our political and administrative leaders have made it harder to get the resources to do that job. While the reality might be that the two bonds are independent and should be judged independently, the perception is the schools and the city are competing for the public’s money.

There’s only one way to overcome that perception — work together. It’s past time that those lines of communication be opened.

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