Posted on 21 November 2012 by La Habra Journal
By Yvonne Lanot
La Habra Journal
After a 60 percent passing vote, Measure O will officially start to makes its way to the La Habra community.
Measure O is the La Habra City School District bond proposition that was passed during the recent, Nov. 6, election. This bond that spawned after Proposition 39 passed in 2000, is said to be an extension of the Prop 39 but will cover specific projects, according to La Habra City School District Superintendent, Susan Belenardo.
This measure is a $31 million bond that will help “to modernize and improve classrooms and support facilities […] to reduce annual operating costs,” according to the Measure O ballot text.
And because it is a bond that would authorize the school district to issue up to $31 million in bonds through legal interest rates, the community will have to add no more than $5 per 100,000 thousands of property value on their additional property tax.
Belenardo said that the passing of the bond will have a great impact to the community and will help out the school district in many different ways.
“With the life of the bond, it will give 31 million dollars to the district for specific projects that were identified in the bond. It needed a 55 percent voter approval to pass and it passed with a little more than 60 percent,” Belenardo said. “It was supported by the community as something valuable for our schools, it just provides a continuous revenue stream over the course of the next 20 to 25 years of the $31 million.”
But what’s the next step to the measure passing? Belenardo said that at the last school board meeting on Nov. 13, the board passed all the legal documents of the bond.
“The next step is to get a rating so they can determine what the interest rate of the bonds that will be sold,” Belenardo explained. “And then once the bond is sold, the first issuance of the bond will be about six million dollars to the district to start implementing the projects that were outlined in the bond document.”
Some of the outlined projects that will be improved from the bond passing are upgrades in technology for both student and teachers in classrooms, improve energy efficiency in the schools, as well as modernize school facilities like repairing roofs and upgrading the plumbing, as said in the project list of Measure O.
“The measure passing, in my opinion, is that it was voted by the community,” Belenardo said. “And because the community voted to tax themselves and in order for them to do that they had to have faith in the vision and the leadership and the financial stability of the district to say ‘yes we think this is a good thing for our children’.”
