Issaquah District Families Would See Lower Tax Bill with Proposed Bond

The Issaquah School District will put its final $219 million bond issue to public vote in April, hoping to replace the current bond with an eight-year bond that would be half the amount, resulting in a reduced school tax bill to district families.

Of its bond package, the district says: “Recognizing the current economic climate, the new bond package ($219 million spread over eight years) is structured to be about half as much as the bond debt retiring in 2012. The retiring bond debt will drop the tax rate from $4.85 to $4.05 per $1,000 of assessed property value; approval of the new bond will result in an estimated $4.42 tax rate.”

If approved, the resulting tax bill for owners of a $500,000 home would be $215 less per year than with the current bond, the district says.

Local Bond Dollar Breakdown

The proposed bond includes $39.3 million in funding specifically for the following Sammamish schools:

• Sunny Hills Elementary –$27.1 million to rebuild the school and increase its capacity
• Skyline High School –$6,79 million, largely for improvements to the stadium
• Beaver Lake Middle School –$2.1 million in improvements, including $1.3 million for installing artificial turf and a new track.
• Pine Lake Middle School –$2.07 million for improvements, including $1.3 million to replace the turf at the football field with with artificial turf and add a rubber surface to the track,
• Endeavour  Elementary—$830,000 for improvements
• Discovery Elementary –$440,000 for improvements

Districtwide, the bond includes $20.8 million for maintenance and improvements, including $2.65 million to install closed circuit security cameras at all of the district’s schools and $2.16 million to install electronic locks and key-card entry systems at all district facilities.

A complete list of the bond projects is posted on the district's website.

How Bonds Work

Because the money provided to school districts from the state includes little money for construction, educational technology, or repair, districts generally seek bonds specifically as a way to fund capital projects—renovating and building new schools or repairing facilities.

School bonds are decided in elections, and require a supermajority (60 percent) of voter approval to pass.

If the bond measure is passed, when a district is ready to get to work on a construction project funded through a bond measure, it sells a bond for the amount of the project to financers; the district taxpayers pay back the amount of the bond with interest to the financers over the next several years (much like a typical bank loan).

The exact amount of money each taxpayer owes for the bond depends on their assessed property valuation. The tax rate for a bond is expressed as a certain dollar amount per $1,000 of assessed valuation. For example, a tax rate of $1 per $1,000 of assessed valuation means that the owner of a $500,000 home would pay $500 per year for the bond measure.

The Issaquah School District currently has a Moody’s rating of AAA, which helps keep the cost of financing construction projects down. The district says less than one percent of school districts nationwide hold a triple A rating from Moody’s.