$4M capital levy request before Wahluke voters
The Wahluke boys soccer team in a spring 2023 match. The soccer field would get lights as part of a capital levy request that will be on the ballot for Wahluke School District voters in November.
FILE PHOTO
MATTAWA — Wahluke School District voters will be asked to accept or reject a four-year, $4 million capital improvement levy in the November general election.
If the levy is approved, property owners would pay 99 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value each year. The owner of the property appraised at $300,000 would pay $297 per year.
District superintendent Andy Harlow said the levy would require a bare majority, 50% plus one vote, to pass.
Harlow said the money would be used for specific projects that have been deferred, in some cases for many years.
“This problem has been brewing for a while,” Harlow said.
“What we would do with that (money) is, we’ve got very specific things earmarked,” he said. “This is going 100% to our capital projects.”
People have asked him if the money raised would be used for teacher salaries, and Harlow said it would not.
If the levy is approved, the district would replace the heating-cooling system at Mattawa Elementary at an estimated cost of about $2.7 million. The track at the Wahluke High School football stadium would be replaced at an estimated cost of about $350,000.
“It has so many cracks in it we can’t host district-level events,” Harlow said. “It’s the original one — it’s almost 20 years old now. So it’s got some problems,”
Lights would be installed on the soccer field; currently, it doesn’t have any, which limits its use and usefulness, Harlow said. The tennis courts also would be resurfaced.
“Our tennis courts are really bad. It’s getting to the point where we might not be able to host home matches,” he said.
A fifth possible project would be revamping the football field to add a soccer pitch, he said.
The capital levy request comes at the end of a year-long assessment of the district’s budget, which Harlow said led district administrators to the conclusion that Wahluke had staff in excess of its ability to pay for them.
“We’ve been headed for this cliff for quite a while,” Harlow said. “We keep spending, spending, and it’s just not sustainable. Not only do we have a funding model that’s not sustainable for our staffing model, we don’t have any money left at the end of the day to do the repairs we need to be doing because it all went to staffing.”
As a result, the district reduced its staff by 27 positions through attrition — people left to take new jobs — and retirement.
“So making those cuts, as painful as they were, was a great exercise because it really cleaned up some stuff. Now, are we missing some people and it’s harder with some of our stuff? Yes. You can’t lose 27 people and not notice,” he said.
The staffing reductions resulted in about $2 million in reduced expenses, he said. They did show that the district is trying to use its money as efficiently as it can, he said, which ties back into the projects in the capital levy.
“These (projects) are all things that we think the community can see,” he said. “They are going to see when we update these things, they’re going to know that we did what we said we were going to do. We just want to show that we are being good stewards.”
Cheryl Schweizer may be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.