FORKS — The Quillayute Valley School District board will consider asking voters for approval of two bond issues in March, if the bonds don’t get the necessary 60 percent supermajority needed for passage once all ballots are counted from Tuesday’s general election, said Bill Rohde, board president, on Thursday.
“We’ll do some homework,and find out some of the areas that had low approval ratings and low approval votes and see if meet with can meet with folks and find out what some of the issues were,” Rohde said.
Proposition 1, a $11 million bond to finance a replacement addition to Forks High School in an 83-year-old portion of the building that is too decrepit to use, received 688 yes votes, or 52.52 percent, out of 1,310 counted in the district so far.
The project would have been matched by $7 million in state grants from the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Proposition 2, a $4 million bond that would finance construction of a covered stadium and multipurpose field, was failing with 551 yes votes, or 42.75 percent, of 1,289 votes cast.
2 dependant on 1
The measures were written in such a way that passage of Prop. 2 depended upon approval of Prop. 1.
If the sports facility measure had passed without the high school replacement bond, then it would not have been funded.
More votes will be counted today. County Auditor Patty Rosand said her office had about 14,600 ballots in hand but not counted by Thursday.
On election night, the votes in 24,242 ballots were counted out of the 45,766 sent county-wide.
Rohde said that he didn’t expect an increase higher than 58 percent but that he was still hopeful.
The board president said that he wanted to discover the cause of the failure before reconsidering the issue, learning if people had needed more information about the bonds, if the economy affected the vote or if voters had concerns about specific parts of the bonds.
“We have a lot of folks that are retired that quite possibly took quite a hit when the stock market tanked,” Rohde said.
“Maybe by March, the economy will have calmed down.”
Prop. 1 would have set a tax rate of $1.46 per $1,000 assessed valuation. That means the owner of a $200,000 home would pay $292 more in property taxes.
The bond was for a total amount, so if the total assessed valuation of properties went up in Forks, the rate would go down, Superintendent Diana Reaume said.
The state matches funds based on a district’s entire enrollment.
In Forks, that includes the online Insight School of Washington.
Insight more than doubles the enrollment of Quillayute Valley School District.
The Insight enrollment likely will be removed from consideration for state-matching grants in the next Legislative session, Reaume has said.
“There is potential that we can still get those matching funds for the larger number if we can get it passed in March, so we’ll see,” Rohde said.
The high school — most recently made famous by the Twilight series of novels — was built in 1925.
The bond would have funded the completion of second phase of replacing the aging school.
Phase 1, which took most of the classrooms out of the oldest part of the building, occurred about five years ago.
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Reporter Paige Dickerson can be reached at 360-417-3535 or at paige.dickerson@peninsuladailynews.com.
