In February 2020 @JeffcoSchoolsCo BoE was presented with a Food and Nutrition Services Master Plan.
This plan included a recommendation that Jeffco construct a Central Production Kitchen at Quail Street, w/advantages such as providing fresh consistent food quality and alignment with the previous recommendations of the FNS Task Force.
The cost to implement the Central Production Kitchen was $29.4M, including soft costs.
So what did @JeffcoSchoolsCo do?
Absolutely nothing!
Financial genius Brad Rupert noted that Jeffco didn’t have $30M lying around.
Entrepreneurial wizard Jason Glass noted that Jeffco could use the bottomless pit of Capital Reserve funds or ask voters to approve another bond for the funding.
And District COO Steve Bell, who oversees FNS, just sat there like a lump on a log.
The truth of the matter is that Jeffco DID have money for the project and for some reason either incomprehensibly didn’t realize it, or didn’t want to use it.
In December 2018, Jeffco received $50M in premium from the bond’s first issuance, with another $30M expected from the 2nd issuance. If Jeffco set aside $25M of that for a Fletcher Miller replacement school, which was removed from the bond program, that would leave $25M, almost the $29.4M needed.
Yet, the bond program included kitchen renovations for 41 schools and the construction of 5 new schools. It is not hard to imagine $4.4M in cost savings if a Central Production Facility was created, reducing planned construction and renovation costs.
But the Board didn’t take action and leadership, including Glass, Schuh, Dorland and Bell, did nothing to advance the project while estimated costs have now climbed $10.6M to $40M.
How does that even happen over the course of under 2 years? That’s an increase of 37%.
Let’s be perfectly clear. This is now a $15M mistake. Money that could have been used in classrooms.
$25M in overages were spent on fields while a plan for a central kitchen which would supply fresh food to kids was just forgotten and now, based on current program overages, it is doubtful Jeffco will have the money to complete.
More than 3 years after Jeffco received the first $50M in what eventually became $118M in bond premium there has never been a discussion on how to prioritize or utilize that money, and now it is nearly gone, for unexplainable reasons. That is shameful and fiscal malfeasance by everyone involved.
This is just one of the numerous examples of mismanagement and incompetence related to Jeffco’s bond program. Jeffco should never be trusted to be good stewards of bond money ever again.