August 19, 2015 Tavares, FL (revised August 20)
The Lake County school district has an old school property that is run down and vacant called the Dabney property.
It has been on the market for years, but they finally tore the moldy buildings down so it is a blank lot for development.
A local Dentist offered them $805,000, but then a local Boys & Girls Club that provides non-profit after school activities for students asked to get if for much less,
After many emotional responses, the School Board voted 3 to 2 to turn down the CASH offer of over $800,000 to let the Club have it for just the cost of building demolition and real estate commissions. School Board member Bill Mathias says the net cost to give it to the Boys & Girls Club is $805k - $323K demolish cost - $30k real estate comm = $452,000. So IF the Club pays up the $323+$30,000 = $353,000, then the District will only be giving away
If I heard the video correctly, there are only 50 students in the Boys & Club Leesburg program thus it is costing Lake County taxpayers a subsidy of about $9,040 per student ($452,000 / 50 students) vs the other existing 7,000 students in Lake County schools (per Rosanne Brandeburg). A Club spokesperson said on the video they would use the property to expand services to "five times" that number or about 250. There is no guaranty they have the funding to do that, so this is a costly give away.
Click HERE for the Orlando Sentinel article and the lead sentence is below.
"Lake County School Board members today walked away from an $805,000 offer for the Dabney Elementary property in Leesburg and will instead explore devoting the site to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Lake and Sumter Counties for after-school programs."
Here is the meeting video starting at the point of this agenda item.
If you watch the video, you can see Dr. Moxley, Rosanne Brandeburg and Debbie Stivender describing all the School District priorities that $452,000 could be used for, including computers, school buses, etc.
As a taxpayer advocate, I think the Board members, Marc Dodd, Stephanie Luke and Bill Mathias, who approved turning down the $805,000 offer should be lectured on taxpayer rights to the full value of the land vs giving it away to a favored charity. This has emotional decision making and political correctness all over it.
This reminds me when an earlier school board decided to waive school impact fees, which resulted in $30-million in lost revenue over 3 years. They did that to support homebuilders who did not want to pay the fee, thus gave up their responsibility to ensure the schools operated with adequate funding.
I guess it feels good to give away $452,000 of taxpayer funds to a favored non-profit.
Clearly they have too much money and voters should turn down the pending November referendum to renew the penny sales tax.
Vance Jochim
FiscalRangers.com
