Pickerington Area Taxpayers Alliance

Dear friends and neighbors:

Believe me, I share your frustrations with the PLSD, the School Board, the City government and, above all, the City Council. I remind you, however, that this is a democracy and, as voters, we have the ability to solve these problems by simply throwing the bums out. We need to do that.

I am no defender of the PLSD. I have sent three daughters through Pickerington Schools. We have some very good teachers. However, we also have some very bad ones. And the state report card, in my mind, counts for nothing. Most school districts with an upper middle class composition, such as ours, do well on state report cards. Parents have as much, if not more, to do with this than schools.

I am as disgusted as anyone with that boondoggle on Refugee Road. If you were paying attention to all of this at the time, you would know that Gail Oakes and I fought that project tooth and claw. We could, and should, have built those two new schools for $10-15 million less, and if the administration and their three supporters on the school board had not embraced the ''minimal new millage'' concept, we could have saved another $15 million in interest over the 28-year life of the bond offering.

I think I once said, on this board, that athletic facilities account for more than $12 million of this project's cost. Please put the emphasis on ''more than.'' It appears that the concession stand alone will cost $1.5 million.

However, we voters must share the blame for the PLSD's woes. For as long as I can remember (and I have been regularly attending School Board meetings for a decade), PLSD voters have elected School Board members who have been either unable or unwilling to ask hard questions, to insist on a tight budget, or to exercise any meaningful level of oversight over PLSD operations. The School Board has functioned, not as the governing body of the PLSD, but as a PLSD booster club.
During this time, there has been little public support for School Board members who tried to break this mold. Indeed, some of us, along with our families, have been targeted for considerable personal abuse.

Sewers, not Schools

With Wes Monhollen's election the Board, we finally have begun to function more as a governing body than as a booster club. However, the Board still includes two holdovers from the booster club era. We need to stop electing and re-electing such people and, instead, elect only qualified, diligent, honest, fiscally responsible and public-spirited candidates to the Board. If we do that, we can turn things around. If we do not, we deserve what we get.

Voters also can solve the City's problems at a stroke by recalling Councilmen Fox, Maxey, Parket and Wright, along with Mayor Postage, and by insisting that their successors promptly turn City Manager Bushman out of office. I have concluded, as I think have most voters, that these individuals are irretrievably wedded to builder and developer interests, to the complete detriment of the common good of this community. They need, and deserve, to be recalled. If only three City residents would come forward to sign the recall petitions, these folks could be out of office by the end of the summer.

Short of that, voters could stop the City's run-away residential growth in its tracks by passing an initiative forbidding expansion of the City's sewer and water capacity. Once existing capacity as exhausted, which would happen soon, builders would be forced to use septic fields and wells for new construction, which would assure that new homes were built in small numbers on large lots.

Although the PLSD officials and the current School Board leave a great deal to be desired, trying to punish them, and the City, by defeating this May's school levy would be self-destructive. Although I am no uncritical defender of the PLSD, I am a passionate defender of good public schools. Without them, this truck driver's son could never have gone to Princeton, or become an attorney. Let's work together to make our schools more cost-conscious and better.

Certainly we could slow residential growth by making this a miserable place to live. But then we would all still have to live here.

If you want to bottle-neck residential growth, use the sewers, not the schools.

It has to be fixed in steps....

I have to tell you, many of Bruce's points hit home with me. There is no ''Silver Bullet'' to slay the beast that has caused the problems our schools face or our Community faces for that matter.

If there was one fix, certainly someone would have figured it out by now. What needs to happen now is growth needs to be slowed until a plan to dig us out of this mess can be devised.

Again, I believe this too must happen in stages.

First - Come to the City Council Meeting on April 1st - a very appropriate day & I hope the papers have their cartoonists poised on ''high alert !!

We need to support David Shaver & his attempt to slow growth now in a 1 year ''moratorium'' on housing - limiting permits to 100 homes in the calendar year following the ordinance's passage. People need to see & hear how each Council member supports this or doesn't. Each members vote needs to be very public & hopefully each member of Council will be present to cast that vote.

Second, there is a more stringent version of a ''Growth Plan'' or moratorium which has been filed as an Initiative Petition. With enough signatures it can be on the ballot in November & slow growth in the City to 1.5% for the next two years. It also requires that the City develop a 10 year growth plan & a way to fund that growth - seems silly that voters must require their City to actually plan by Initiative !! But that's where we are - any interested signers or people interested in carrying this petition can contact Ted Hackworth or myself & I will get a petition to you to sign, Ted can get a petition to you to carry. This Initiative has been modelled after the growth plan implemented by Hudson, OH which stood up to the Supreme Court of Appeals.

This is the time to stand up & take back your Community. You elected Officials to represent you - now demand that they do.

Expectations

For years now this School Board and the local leaders have raised the expectations of the citizens with false hopes. These leaders have provided us with news clips that sound like we are all doing great here in Pickerington when actually our system was failing. The only solution was to go back to the voters and asked for more money. Never fixing the problem. Trying to fool the people into thinking one more tax increase will finally fix our schools. It won't happen.

Many people have moved here expecting this school system to provide them with an excellent education for their children and no taxes. Somehow we never quite got there. Now most of us are faced with some kind of money problem. Yet the schools are still thinking we can provide them with even more moeny from our strapped personnal budgets. Many can't, some won't and many are angry.

We have a city government so controlled by the BIA that they can determine who they represent. That same control extends over into the school board. How do we correct the problem??

Sometimes you must start all over again. Maybe a totla colapse of the schools is what is really needed. I have heard many talk and many talk some more. When will those that are talking do something as a group? Clearly we have all been lead down the wrong path. We are now cornered. We must face the reality and correct it. Making the school system fail will show those that haven't been paying attention that our problems are very serious. It will take new leadership to correct it. The current leaders got us into this mess.