Vote yes for schools

To The Eagle:

Time do fly when you're havin' fun. It's just shy of one decade since we had a rousing good knock down, drag-out community debate over the fate of the then-shabby Julius Wendt school building. The school board wanted to tear down and rebuild for over seven million dollars and some of us skinflints wanted to just repair it for about forty bucks. After many gallons of printers ink on these pages, more than a few high temp school board meetings, and three trips to the ballot box, moderation prevailed and we got the nifty remodel job that now stands on our campus for less than a third of what the rebuild would have cost.

In an effort to avoid another OK Corral-type showdown, our school administration formed a committee to start work on a remodel plan for the high school in 2008, but then the housing bubble popped, the economy tanked, and a wise decision was made to postpone the remodel until the outlook was a little brighter. With the federal government's War on Prosperity now in full swing, those halcyon days seem ever farther away, so our school board has come up with a resourceful Plan B. By extending and enhancing the school M&O levy, we can phase in some preventive maintenance and minor renovation spending little more money than we were going to have to spend anyway.

Besides the obvious disadvantages of an immediate start and keeping the work very local, a big bonus is in avoidance of planning fees, contingency fees, impact statements and all other administrative costs that are bundled into a formal remodel. It's a great plan and the ballot to enable us to do it is in your hands at this very moment. As the hard-boiled private investigator Spenser would say, "We'd be fools not to."

Howard Brawn

Puget Island