Sent: Tuesday, September 4, 2018 7:51 AM
To: Jeffco Schools Board of Education <board@jeffco.k12.co.us>
Subject: Is there anyone on the District Staff that taxpayers can trust?
Good morning,
Someone on the District staff gave Glass and Ali inaccurate and deceptive information.
Recently, I’ve heard numerous Jeffco schools related people, including Glass and Ali Lasell say that Jeffco schools has $1.3B in “Deferred Maintenance” (at 4:44 of A Community Guide from Dr. Glass, http://jeffcopublicschools.org/cms/one.aspx?pageId=4540440 and at 6:32 of Talking Ed: Jeffco’s Future Fundinghttp://www.jeffcopublicschools.org/about/superintendent/futurefunding/mill_levy ).
However, that’s far from the truth!
There is a very specific definition of “Deferred Maintenance”. The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board defines “Deferred Maintenance” as maintenance and repairs that were not performed when they should have been or were scheduled to be and which are put off or delayed for a future period.
The key point is that Deferred Maintenance is maintenance that was delayed. This definition does not discuss, or include, maintenance that may be scheduled to be performed in the future.
I looked at Jeffco’s 2016-2017 Facility Condition Assessment (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1rGW26Xs8ZMN1J4OGVvYlI3ZnM/view), the latest I could find, to determine how the District could come up with $1.3B in Deferred Maintenance. I couldn’t even come close.
First, the document discusses $575M in 2016-17 facilities “needs”. $440M of this comes from facilities and another $135M in Educational Adequacy deficiencies.
Yet, even that $575M total is not “Deferred Maintenance”. $475M of this amount is classified as Priorities 3, 4 and 5. That means that they are costs expected sometime in the future, not maintenance that was deferred.
Since Priority 3 is for 2-3 years in the future and consists of $234M, I will assume that this has all been deferred and can be added it to the Priority 1 and 2 categories of 2016-17. This gives a total of $334M in deficiencies costs in 2018-19.
The other component of facilities costs this document describes are Life Cycle Renewal costs. These costs are related to things such as roofing, heating, plumbing, stairs and elevators. Costs related to this are projected yearly for 5 years out. These costs were projected to be the following:
| 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
| $51M | $108M | $94M | $73M | $43M |
Assuming that all Life Cycle costs for 2017-18 and 2018-19 were deferred, we can add another $159M to the District’s Deferred Maintenance to come up with a generous estimate of $493M in Deferred Maintenance costs.
A generous $493M in Deferred Maintenance is NOT the $1.3B in Deferred Maintenance that Glass and Ali have been repeating. Their statements are outright false when the FASAB definition of Deferred Maintenance is used!
What they are saying is inaccurate, misleading and deceptive and brings the credibility of Glass and the Board into question. Glass has no excuse to not know better and the staff member who gave Glass that sound bite is either incompetent or intentionally deceptive.
How can you expect taxpayers to trust Glass and District staff when there are so many instances of inaccuracies, deception and word parsing?
Bob Greenawalt