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The Pleasanton school board is set to discuss a resolution to issue the first round of bond sales totaling $100 million from the $395 million Measure I general obligation bond during Thursday’s board meeting.
Two months have gone by since Pleasanton voters passed Measure I, which will go toward funding for school facility upgrades.
With the November election results having been certified, PUSD has begun the process of creating a detailed implementation plan that will help ensure they deliver the promises listed in the bond — the proposed resolution is one piece of that implementation plan.
Pleasanton Unified School District’s Board of Trustees will be reviewing the resolution, which outlines these first series of bonds, before district staff return to the board on Feb. 23 to seek authorization to move forward with completing the necessary financing steps.
“The resolution authorizes the issuance of the bonds and establishes parameters for the terms thereof, approves the forms of and authorizes the execution and delivery of the financing documents (including the bond purchase agreement and the continuing disclosure certificate), approves the form of and authorizes the distribution of the official statement (in preliminary and final form), and sets forth the security provisions for the bonds and the covenants of the district to bond owners,” the staff report states.
The bond purchase agreement, according to the report, will specify things like the “purchase price of the bonds to be paid by the underwriter, the interest rates, maturity dates and principal amounts of each maturity of the bonds.”
According to the staff report, the board will look at legal documents and financial information with the help of several counsel groups, but will not take any action until the Feb. 23 meeting.
“The bonds will be sold and issued by the District,” according to the staff report. “Keygent LLC will serve as municipal advisor to the district. Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP will serve as bond counsel and disclosure counsel. Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Incorporated will serve as the underwriter.”
The board’s open-session meeting is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. Thursday (Feb. 9).
Read the full agenda here.
In other business
* PUSD Superintendent David Haglund will be seeking the board’s authorization so that he could award a contract to the lowest bidder for the Foothill High School Pool Repair and Resurfacing Project.
Ever since the first devastating atmospheric river storm began on New Year’s Eve, the district and the city have been working on clearing debris and mud from the creek on the southside of the school, which overflowed and caused damage to the pool and tennis courts.
The district had been working with contractors to estimate the damage and find ways to repair the damage to the pool.
While analyzing the damage, staff pointed out that the pool had not been re-plastered for about 18 years and that the pool surface is in a very poor and unsafe condition.
“Many parts of the pool surface are significantly chipped,” according to the report. “Prior repairs to the pool plaster were failing, creating a potentially hazardous situation for students.”
So instead of clearing the pool from mud or repairing the plaster separately, staff are suggesting to combine both projects in an effort to minimize wasting water.
District staff have already issued an informal bid for the re-plastering and expect to receive those bids back on Thursday so that work can begin the following week with the goal of completing all the work by March.
But in order to expedite the process and minimize the impact on the use of the pool, staff are asking the board to delegate the awarding of the bid to Haglund.
According to the report, the total amount of the bid is not to exceed $200,000.
* District staff will be looking for the board to approve the continuation of installing new burglary alarms at eight schools in the district.
Part of the $270 million Measure I1 bond promises from 2016 included initiatives to improve the safety of all 15 schools at PUSD. That included funding intrusion detection systems.
Then in January of 2022, the district began meeting with Van Pelt Construction Services to review the current system and to evaluate what the district needed to improve.
“These meetings established a baseline for features to look for when reviewing upgrade options and platforms, including the following: remote access for arming and disarming, easy identification of users, being quickly able to review and identify false/actual intrusions, self-manageable and can be reconfigured as needed without third party service call,” the staff report states.
After these meetings, the district landed on the Verkada Alarms platform, which the board approved a pilot testing of the program to be installed at Hart Middle School last year in October.
The report states that the pilot was a success and the next phase of the project will be to install these new alarm systems at eight elementary schools.
The schools include: Alisal, Donlon, Fairlands, Hearst, Mohr, Valley View, Vintage Hills and Walnut Grove elementary schools.
Lydiksen Elementary School will also get the new system but installation at that site will be coordinated with the large campus-wide rebuild project as a stand-alone project.
The total construction costs for this phase of the project are $626,915.90 with a 10% contingency of $63,759.83 for additional material and incidental work that might come up.
* The Board of Trustees will be receiving two updates on the district’s annual enrollment and projected numbers for the next few years.
In two consecutive agenda items, district staff will be presenting the annual census data for the total number of enrolled students, which is currently at 13,837. That is 229 less students than last year and just over 1,000 less than over the last five years, according to the report.
Staff will also present the Demographer Enrollment Projection Update 2023-29, which states that enrollment is projected to decline further in the next seven years.
The report also states that the current schools will be able to handle the growth from the new proposed housing under the city’s 2023-31 Housing Element Update, but the decrease in numbers will still affect the district’s overall budget.
“The fiscal impact will be realized in our revenues over time,” the report states. “Our revenues correlate to student attendance and the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). The LCFF is calculated based on Average Daily Attendance (ADA) and per-student funding allocation. In 2022-23, the average Base Grant LCFF Grant per student is about $10,919. The loss of every 100 students is about a $1 million revenue loss for PUSD.”
