Lake County School District Impact Fee controversy - our take

If you read the local newspapers, the County Commissioners and the Lake County School Board members are under attack by a group of construction related firms, including the management of the big Romac lumber yard.  They have made emotional and personal attacks on members of the above boards about the proposed School District and Transportation Impact fees without many supporting facts.  You might say it is a lobbying attempt by builders to stop impact fees on new houses to keep house building costs and resulting government fees for schools and roads below true costs ( assuming the impact fees were properly calculated, which I might question).

So, now the Romac manager, who pays for the little "Sour Orange" advertorial in page two of the Daily Commercial, runs the related website www.sourorange.net, and now has a new attack dog website on impact fees at www.LakeCountygov.info needs some feedback on his assumptions.  Although he runs a business, he seems to miss the fact that data from the School District Superintendent's staff may be the problem, not the board. So here is the email I sent to him, the School District Board and the two papers:

Hey Sour Orange Editor and Lumber Yard Manager

(afraid to put your real name, address and house picture on your website?),

If the point of your sophomoric, emotional attacks and “LakeCountygov.info”  website is to support reduced impact fees, why do you attack the School Board, but not Superintendent Anna Cowin?

She is the one that consistently refuses open info on spending, fights the audit committee and auditor position (I am on the Audit Committee), and has lost 3 CFO’s. Although the schools have to track student test results publicly, thus providing accountability, Cowin does not do the same for management performance indicators. Thus there are no published credible benchmarks of departmental performance to ensure school administration is effective, economical and efficient. This could be a main reason why the School Board is given high figures needed for impact fees. For instance, you have a lumber yard and probably track vehicle downtime and mileage and utilization – and maybe even compare your stats to industry benchmarks. Can we say the same for the School District management?

We can’t ignore that Cowin is a strong program manager, pushing through new programs to build a portfolio of “results” that any consultant might like to have in their resume. However, she fights and completely ignores any responsibility to provide serious, publicly available management performance data to identify whether she is cost efficient, or is spending excess amounts on certain programs to build that portfolio while being unconcerned how efficient the funds are being spent.

For example, why don’t you look at the last budget and see if your business would authorize spending based upon the skimpy supporting PERFORMANCE ratio data (not just historical cost) given to the Board for each budget area. The newspapers may not understand this topic, but you own a business, so you should understand it.

Look at the School District website and you won’t see any public, objectively developed performance benchmarks of administration activities. However, in the industrial world, it is common to track and report on return on investment per facility, revenues received per capital asset, etc. Even the Federal government is now changed, and instead of Chief Financial Officers, they have Chief Resource Managers to monitor and improve return on people, short term and capital spending.

Why don’t you ask why the Board is given spending proposals by Cowin’s staff without professional justification data so they can make an informed decision.  At many meetings, you see where Board members complain about the skimpy data provided by Cowin’s staff to support multi-million dollar spending proposals.

Or, why does the Lake County School District have different contractors working on the different construction projects rather than one consolidated efficient firm using the same design for schools like Orange County does to reduce overall construction costs.

Your attacks are missing the big picture – if there are no credible performance benchmarks being used for District administration costs, and maybe they don’t even compare a ratio of non-instructional staff to totals vs other efficient organizations (i.e. even the Catholic schools), then the real problem is that POOR management direction by the current and prior Superintendents is resulting in high costs which are used to produce the numbers given to the Board to justify those high impact fees you complain about. Think about how inefficient your lumber yard could be if you didn’t have any competition, and didn’t have to run performance measurements to keep costs in control.

There may be some benchmarks used by other  School Districts, but for non-instructional work, why don’t they use benchmarks from the corporate or industrial world? Why should school bus utilization efficiency benchmarks be any less or different than fleet management of a Rinker operation?

You run a business… focus on the management side of the School District and lack of publicly published data and performance ratios for all non-instructional positions and tasks, and you might find where the excess “justification” for such high impact fees is coming from. The responsibility, access, definition, creation and tracking of such indicators and performance goals is NOT under the Board, but under the Superintendent who provides direction to over 5,000 employees. Hopefully, the Board will hire a superintendent next year who focuses not only on school teaching results, but developing tough non-instructional performance benchmarks, goals and public posting of planned and actual results for this $700-million budgeted School District with 5,000 employees.

Then, if they actually have an audit department located near District headquarters to confirm that the benchmarks (as well as impact fee calculations) were properly calculated and openly published, the public could have better confidence in impact fee calculations given to the Board for approval.

Vance Jochim

Tavares

Former Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) and former Director Internal Audit at Nissan Motor Corp and Atlantic Richfield Petroleum, as well as an 80 location construction materials corp. (now owned by Rinker)

Member of the   School District Audit Committee
Owner of a “one hippo” house that supports six squirrels and a one-legged red cardinal.
Publisher of the LakeCountyFiscalRangers website at http://webworks.typepad.com/lakecountyfiscalrangers/

PS:  It is possible that some District internal departments are running accurate industrial quality performance benchmarks (not watered down government ratios)  and control productivity.  But until I see that data, and the same for all administration departments published in a transparent manner on the District website for public review and analysis, I will continue to believe that most departments don't run adequate performance benchmarks that are credible.  vj