Local public projects hit by mounting construction expenses
 A student heads to class amid construction at Foothill College. The Foothill-De Anza Community College District has proposed a $491 million bond measure to complete the project. |
Local taxpayers face a deluge of requests to fund public projects, from school district and hospital facilities to sewer systems and regional transportation plans. The two local school districts will seek additional funds and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors will place a measure on the June 6 ballot for a half-cent sales tax increase.
Los Altos residents will pay more to bring the sewer system in conformity with the sewer master plan.
Skyrocketing construction costs force the Foothill-De Anza Community College District to request additional funding with a $491 million bond measure this June.
The district’s 1999 bond measure for $248 million cannot cover the full project.
The Los Altos School District may go back to voters with a Phase II plan in 2008 that would cover what the 1998 $94.7 million bond measure did not.
The Town Crier examines what has occurred in recent years, the contributing factors and what lies ahead.
LASD Phase II
A majority of that funding would be targeted toward renovation of the Bullis-Purissima campus in Los Altos Hills for use as an elementary school to open in 2008. Renovation of the campus was originally included among the projects detailed in the 1998 Measure H.
Registered voters within the school district, which includes most of Los Altos and Los Altos Hills and parts of Mountain View and Palo Alto, voted in 2002 to approve a parcel tax increase to $597 per parcel per year.
Margot Harrigan, president of the Board of Trustees for LASD, said the school district hopes to complete and reopen Bullis-Purissima school before the Phase II bond is posted on the ballot.
Justus said the tentative date to place Phase II on the ballot is sometime in 2008. After the initial Phase I construction, Justus said not every site received permanent libraries, multipurpose rooms or office spaces. Another bond could ensure permanent facilities for every school. Some schools have libraries in portables.
Opening Bullis before the start of the Phase II campaign would alleviate the overflow that some schools in the district suffer, Harrigan said. It could also lower the dollar amount requested in Phase II.
Randy Kenyon, assistant superintendent for business services, estimated that the Phase II bond measure would request between $50 and $60 million.
College District Measure C
The average taxpayer in the college district might expect to pay an additional $117 per year over the next 30 years if Measure C is approved.
“This is desperately needed - we can’t afford to delay repairs. The needs aren’t going to go away,” said Betsey Bechtel, president of the board of trustees. “Our colleges were built in 1957 for 8,000 students. We now serve almost 60,000 students each year.”
The dollar amount of the bond is big, Bechtel said, because it is meant to last a long time, funding improvement projects for the next 15 years without requests for further bond measures.
Measure C is the first proposed bond to include technological upgrades for the district. The 2001 passage of Proposition 39 broadened the field of projects eligible for bond funding. The measure requires 55 percent voter approval to pass.
“There’s huge support for Foothill and De Anza in the community, because most people have attended class here,” Bechtel said. “We also provide training for nurses, dental hygienists, auto repair and for many companies for which we provide a work force. There is a return on the community’s investment.”
El Camino Hospital
Costs for rebuilding El Camino Hospital to meet the latest seismic standards and the future needs of the community have soared from $298 million to $450 million since 2003. Construction costs for California hospitals in general are rising at a rate of 20 percent per year as they compete for qualified contractors and in-demand materials.
Further complicating the situation and increasing the expense for El Camino is Aaron Katz’s lawsuit, awaiting a hearing in the Court of Appeals at press time. In January 2005, Katz, an attorney who lives in Saratoga and owns condominiums in Mountain View, challenged the legality of the hospital district’s November 2003 bond election, asserting that only owners of property in the district - regardless of where they live - should have been allowed to vote. The $148 million in general obligation bonds approved by 70 percent of the voters cannot be rated and issued until the final ruling on the case. Construction of the new acute-care facility the bonds were earmarked for was to have begun last September but remains stalled. The hospital estimates the cost of the delay at approximately $4.5 million.
The hospital facilities planning committee is scheduled to meet at 6 p.m. Thursday to review several possibilities for pushing ahead. The board of directors will consider the best of these in a meeting scheduled for 5:30 p.m. April 5. Ken King, vice president for facilities, said last week, “I think we’ve got some doable solutions. The real question is: How do we pay for it?”
Dr. Ed Bough, board chairman, said facilities personnel plan to review at least seven ways of changing start dates, finding additional financing and altering sizes of construction projects.
“A long delay in starting would be extremely disadvantageous. It’s never going to be cheaper than it is now,” Bough said last week. “Cutting way back on the scope of the project makes no sense because the purpose was to create a hospital based on the demographics and the need for medical demand that we spent a long time trying to determine. It’s not overbuilt - it’s designed for our needs in the future.”
Bough said most of Thursday’s discussion will be “to determine the least difficult method - nothing is optimal - of financing the hospital.”
He added, “In a situation like this, there are no easy choices. Whatever we choose will be the least painful alternative.”
City sewer system
Five and three-quarters full-time-equivalent employees maintain 140 miles of vitrified clay pipe serving most residents and businesses in the city and the unincorporated area in the city’s sphere of influence, a portion of Los Altos Hills and a small part of Mountain View. Los Altos Hills will pay roughly $2.9 million of the costs of the improvements. Los Altos has an agreement with Mountain View, through which some of the city’s sewage flows, but no money changes hands. The total flow through city pipes by 2024 is expected to increase from 3.6 million to 4.15 million gallons per day.
Los Altos residents’ current monthly bill of $21, the result of four increases in four years, is projected to rise to nearly $65 by 2024. The master plan recommends an increase of $2.75 per month next year.
“It’s important to note that those rates include capital work, day-to-day operations and costs of treating sewage discharged into the bay,” Public Works Director Jim Porter said.
Less than 2 percent of the 34 miles of pipe inspected between 1994 and 2003 was found to be in poor condition; 63 percent was in moderate condition. The Pine Lane and Van Buren pump stations need major work, according to the master plan.
“Sewers are not built of steel and concrete, so costs are not going up (as they are) for other construction,” Porter said.
To save money and staff time, public works staff recommend making spot repairs, rehabilitating the sewer, dissolving roots in the pipes and increasing grease control. The Los Altos City Council recently gave staff the go-ahead to collect bids for chemical root treatment of 90,000 linear feet of pipeline per year. The annual capital cost is $270,000, of which Los Altos Hills will pay $37,000.
Half-cent sales tax
The ballot measure requires a two-thirds vote for approval and would go into effect Oct. 1. It is crafted as a general tax: Decisions on how to spend the funds would require a series of public hearings and approval by the board of supervisors.
Although the board of supervisors remains firm that it has not laid out its spending plans, labor unions and business lobbyists expect a portion of the funds - as much as half the revenue - to go toward Valley Transportation Agency (VTA) transit projects and BART expansion.
The county estimates that the half-cent sales tax could generate between $153.9 million and $170.3 million in 2008.
Opponents of the tax and a few local officials raised concerns that a backroom deal was struck between the county and VTA. Closed-door discussions with county supervisors began as soon as the VTA realized it would not be able to pass its own half-cent tax measure, said David Casas, a Los Altos city councilman on the VTA policy advisory committee.
“Supporters of this tax will try hard to obscure the truth and hope that the voting public does not notice they are being taken advantage of,” Casas said.
Bob Brownstein, a policy and research director of Working Partnerships, a think tank based in San Jose, counters that BART is still a high priority for voters in the northern part of the county and that VTA has worked aggressively to stay on its Measure B budget.
If approved for transportation purposes, the additional revenue would offset shortfalls from Measure B, the 9-year sales-tax increase that expires March 31.
Los Altos Mayor Ron Packard has doubts about funding further transportation and transit projects.
“While I’m all in favor of (a 25 percent increase) going toward county services, I have some grave reservations about the transportation portion. A lot can be wasted on projects that are of little use to the public,” he said.
Mountain View City Councilman Greg Perry, who serves on a nonvoting advisory panel to VTA, is an outspoken opponent. Two half-cent sales-tax increases have already failed to do what VTA set out to accomplish, he said. He cited Measure B, a general sales tax approved in 1996 that funneled money toward VTA projects, and Measure A, a 30-year, half-cent sales tax approved specifically for BART six years ago that goes into effect April 1.
“There wasn’t enough money to finish all the projects promised in Measure B, and they blamed it on the recession. There isn’t enough money to do those projects in Measure A. What’s going to stop them from coming back in 10 years to ask for more?” Perry said.
Earlier this month, county supervisors, who voted 4-1 to place the sales tax on the ballot, emphasized the urgent need for more funding.
“Our safety net is threatened. In many ways, we must look to our citizens to support these crucial and critical county services,” County Supervisor Liz Kniss said.
In recent years, more than $640 million has been slashed from the county budget, she added. Hospitals, clinics and trauma centers were among the programs suffering most, she said.
- Eliza Ridgeway and Traci Newell (schools), Kathleen Acuff (El Camino Hospital and Los Altos sewers) and Megan Ma (county sales tax) contributed to this report.
