Ord
As I wrote in today’s paper, Ord’s $9.8 million bond issue seems to come down to one defining issue: Are the school’s fire and ventilation issues best addressed along with a new gym, or should they be considered separately? Pro-bond folks say it doesn’t make sense to fix one without the other, especially since the school says the cheapest way to resolve fire issues in the library is to move it to the current practice gym — thus necessitating a new gym.

People who oppose the bond issue say the school has other options for fixing all of these issues rather than lumping them together in one multimillion-dollar bond issue. They say the school district hasn’t done a diligent enough job looking at those alternatives and that they’ve been steadily guided toward a bond issue by their architects, Bahr, Vermeer and Haecker of Lincoln.

St. Paul
St. Paul’s $4.7 million bond issue for elementary and high school expansions along with fixes for fire and safety code issues passed last November. It never faced any organized opposition, but the big issue there had to do with timing: The vote took place just after the nation’s economy fell headlong into its recession. As Superintendent Doug Ackles noted last October, the bond’s chances were better in a poor economy because it was a nuts-and-bolts project designed to resolve overcrowding issues and meet fire code requirements.

Like Ord, St. Paul faced a fix-it-or-else order from the state fire marshal, which added some urgency. But had St. Paul’s project been a gym or an auditorium, Ackles said, it might have been a tougher sell.

Broken Bow
Broken Bow’s proposed $9.4 million bond issue for a new elementary school was pummeled at the polls in May 2008. The central issue there was somewhat similar to Ord’s: Opponents of the bond wanted the school to fix the current elementary buildings, which they acknowledged were in poor shape, rather than building a new one. This ended up setting up the “Resolve it all in one shot” vs. “Save money and fix things gradually” conflict that we’re also seeing in Ord.

Just as in Ord, opponents also lobbied for the school board to explore other options and questioned its exclusive use of Bahr, Vermeer and Haecker to plan the project.

Central City
Central City’s bond issue, a $4.6 million one for a new performing arts center, was the outlier among the area’s recent school bonds. First, it began with private fundraising, rather than a community facilities committee. The move toward a bond began when a local couple left $600,000 in their estate for an arts center. A school committee raised money to bring pledges for an endowment for the center’s upkeep to $1.5 million, and then the district voted to pursue a bond.

There was no organized opposition to this bond, either, but it failed on its first try in November 2007. Some of the opposition, as always, had to do with cost, but some of it also had to do with the center’s proposed location at the school and how much the community would be able to use it. When the district tried again in May 2008, it passed, though the vote total wasn’t much different from the first attempt.

Gibbon
Gibbon’s $16.3 million school bond for a new K-12 school was far larger than any of the others (a 48.9-cent levy), and while there was little organized opposition before the vote, much of the talk focused on the project’s sheer size. After the bond passed in September 2006, the opposition came out of the woodwork in the form of an attempt to recall half the school board.

The recall essentially served as a referendum on the bond issue six months after the initial vote (and it passed again, as the board members retained their spots). The recall group’s primary contention was that the school board had concealed the true cost of the bond and — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — didn’t consider less costly alternatives to building a new school. (And yes, the school also hired Bahr, Vermeer and Haecker.) Opposition died down after the recall’s failure, and the new building opened its doors in August.

Burwell
— The big news out of Burwell is that the city council is taking bids for the Community Memorial Health Center, Burwell’s city-owned nursing home and assisted-living center. (The bids were due last Thursday, but I haven’t checked yet to see what was received. I’ll do that this week.) Last week’s Burwell Tribune had a very informative article on the issue by former City Councilwoman Melissa Schere, who ended it with a barely implicit recommendation to sell the hospital to a for-profit company. On the next page, it ran a letter to the editor from another former city councilman, Ron Kerkman, opposing the city’s sale. The center is the town’s largest employer, so this is sure to continue to be heated issue as the city and the center’s board make a decision. We’ll keep an eye on it.

— In less contentious Burwell news, Augy’s Fitness Center, owned by Bob Augustyn, was scheduled to hold its grand opening last week, according to the Burwell Tribune. It’s in the Hub Building, the historic building at the center of Burwell’s downtown square. The Independent wrote about John and Melissa Schere’s efforts to restore the Hub in 2006.

Loup City
— Loup City is moving forward on Viaero Wireless’ plans to build a retail store there, two and a half years after the company agreed to do so. At its Sept. 8 meeting, the city council gave Viaero a variance to build its building on a lot that would otherwise be too small to be allowed under city code. The city planning commission has given it a preliminary OK, too. You can find details of the city’s struggles with Viaero in this story from August.

St. Paul
— According to minutes from the St. Paul City Council’s Sept. 21 meeting, its new fire truck is ready to go. The city will be borrowing $33,500 after receiving a $250,000 grant for it last year.

Gibbon
— Gibbon’s swimming pool will be getting an evaluation from Olsson Associates as part of preliminary steps toward a new pool, per the minutes from the city council’s Sept. 21 meeting.

I spend a lot of my time in the summer writing about these festivals, and I think they’re an underrated source of summer fun, especially for people who don’t mind their summer events off the beaten path or outside the box. I haven’t been to as many as I’d like, but here are a few aspects that make each of these festivals notable in their own way:

Free food:
Kool-Aid Days, Hastings: One of the area’s largest festivals, and certainly one of its most colorful, too. Kool-Aid Days was held last weekend, and they reported that 32,000 showed up, many of whom drank all the Kool-Aid they could drink for free (with purchase of a mug) at the World’s Largest Kool-Aid Stand. Fourteen flavors of goodness were there, with only one downside: For the first time ever, the stand ran out of Kool-Aid this year.

Popcorn Days, North Loup: Coming up next weekend, it’s all the popcorn you can eat for free. The festival in the 324-person Valley County town is also the area’s longest continuously running festival, at 108 years this year. That’s more popcorn than I can comprehend.

History:
Grover Cleveland Alexander Days, St. Paul: Named for the most famous athlete in Central Nebraska history, baseball Hall of Famer (and Elba native) Grover Cleveland “Ol’ Pete” Alexander, GCA Days is a trip through Nebraska baseball history every year. The event’s parade always has a former Nebraska major leaguer as grand marshal, and the Museum of Nebraska Major League Baseball uses the weekend each July as an opportunity to unveil its newest exhibits.

Annevar, Ravenna: The annual Annevar (I’ll save you the time–it’s Ravenna spelled backward) festival in June includes a focus on history from the Historical Society of Ravenna. I especially enjoyed this year’s feature on John Pesek, who might give Tom Rathman a run for his money as Central Nebraska’s most famous professional athlete (non-baseball division, of course).

Sheer lunacy:
Nebraska’s Big Rodeo, Burwell: The people who choose to ride those bulls and broncos may be nuts, but it’s certainly not lunacy to attend. The name isn’t lying — this event is among Nebraska’s biggest rodeos, if not its biggest, with some 15,000 people attending the last week of July. It’s the event Burwell hangs its wide-brimmed hat on.

Polar Bear Dip, Cedar Rapids: If you want to participate in lunacy yourself, head to the icy Cedar River in southwest Boone County during February for Cedar Rapids’ Polar Bear Dip, an annual tradition since 2005. Why would anyone subject themselves to this, you ask? Well, it’s free to dip, but you have to pay to watch. It’s an exercise in frugality, see — and there’s a nice, warm chili feed afterwards to warm you back up.

“I hope that they walk taller and hold their heads higher and live up to the expectations that the whole community has for them,” Brodine told me after school. “I’m expecting them to step up, and I think they will.”

It’s a refreshing way to look at the privilege of a new school building, and Brodine is right, too: Gibbon’s taxpayers have made a remarkable sacrifice for the sake of a new building. In retrospect, I’m still amazed that bond issue was passed on the first try. That got me thinking: How does Gibbon’s bond issue compare with those other districts have tried over the past few years? Here’s my back-of-a-napkin table:

*The enrollments come from the Nebraska Department of Education’s figures from the opening of the 08-09 school year.
**This was Aurora’s fourth try at this bond, dating back to 1999.

Obviously, not all bonds are created equal. Some of these were tried within wildly differing economic contexts — think February 2006 vs. November 2008 — and all were for different projects. But I think the most telling number here is the second half under “Amount,” and that’s the impact on the tax levy, expressed in cents per $100 in taxable valuation. (Fourteen cents, for example, extrapolates to $140 per $100,000 in valuation, 20 cents is $200, and so on.)

By that measure, this chart is a classic case of “one of these things is not like the other.” Nearly every bond falls in 8.5-cent to 20-cent range — it seems as though school districts have determined that no matter how much they need, there’s only so much they can ask voters to pay for. The only bond that falls outside is Gibbon’s whopping 49-cent asking, more than double what anyone else has even tried. And it passed on the first try. Think about that for a second: Gibbon’s bond was, on a taxpayer-impact level, 3.5 times the size of Broken Bow’s; yet it passed reasonably easily, while Bow’s got hammered.

Maybe, though, Gibbon’s voters just got snowed; they had no idea that was how much they were paying. That’s what a group of taxpayers claimed in calling for the recall of three of the district’s six school board members in May 2007. The vote became a de facto referendum, a mulligan on what the district’s voters had decided just eight months before. And the margin came out even wider in favor of the school board members. The message was clear: The voters understood what they were doing, and given a second chance, they affirmed it.

I’m entirely sure why Gibbon was so much more favorable toward such a huge bond than any other district in Central Nebraska (that’s another topic for another post), but the numbers are clear. For better or worse, Gibbon’s voters chose to make a financial sacrifice that no other community in the area has come close to touching in recent history. No wonder Brodine is so insistent on returning on an investment.