
San Diego Unified School District doesn’t give taxpayers enough clarity on its bond measures, neither in its ballot materials asking voters to approve them nor later about how much money it has or hasn’t spent, a new report finds.
In a 19-page report, the San Diego County Grand Jury says that the district hasn’t consistently complied with state law to inform voters on bond ballot initiatives, offering too little information on ballot summaries and about unspent funds from previous bonds.
San Diego Unified currently has four active bonds of different ages, the newest being Measure U, a $3.2 billion initiative approved by voters in 2022 with 65% of the vote. Also still active are previous bonds from 2008, 2012 and 2018. The district still has $4.58 billion left to issue from those bonds, the grand jury said.
According to grand jurors, in measures after 2012, the district wasn’t clear that property tax rate increases were cumulative as subsequent bonds were approved. They also pointed to a lack of clarity around total debt servicing costs, saying two propositions in 2008 and 2012 did not give debt information as state election law requires.
And in 2018 and 2022, the district included the total service costs elsewhere, but only the annual repayments in the ballot summary information. Many voters rely on these summaries, which were often lacking, the report said.
Bond measure language seemed to use boilerplate language, too, the grand jury said — with initiatives spanning a decade, from 2008 to 2018, listing many of the same projects as ones the bonds could fund.
“This contradicts the argument that each bond presented a ‘specific list’ of projects for voter approval,” the county grand jury wrote. “It also makes it more difficult to hold SDUSD able to voters.”
With its 2022 measure, the district stopped providing a school-specific list of projects, instead offering “only the generic umbrella categorization of work that could be financed by the bonds, without giving voters information about which specific schools would benefit,” their report said.
“It added funds for building staff housing under the rubric, ‘Quality Neighborhood Schools.’”
The grand jury makes seven recommendations for the district going forward — including that it share with voters prior property tax-assessment rates related to outstanding bonds in addition to the one on the ballot, and that it disclose total debt servicing cost figures that include both prior bonds and the new measure.
Voters should also be told how much money in previously approved bonds still hasn’t been spent by the district, and they should be given the required school-specific list of projects each bond would fund, the report says.
And it recommends making sure election officials get summary ballot language that includes “key” property tax rate information, any new initiatives the bond would and details on total debt servicing for bonds previously approved and under review.
The grand jurors also say the district should tell voters just how much debt it’s taking on in total, and whether it will have to seek a waiver to exceed a state-defined 2.5% assessed property value limit for issued bonds.
“The Grand Jury notes that SDUSD failed to respond to repeated requests for documents and some interviews, impeding the conduct of this investigation,” they wrote.
In an emailed statement, Lee Dulgeroff, San Diego Unified’s head of facilities, wrote that the district has transparently operated its bond program and will cooperate with the grand jury by carefully reviewing and responding to its report. Agencies led by non-elected officials have 90 days to comment.
He said the district has completed 257 major projects to facilities over 16 years, work that has been monitored by an independent oversight committee.
“It is important for the community to know our voter-approved bond program is independently audited on an annual basis and for 13 consecutive years has earned the highest opinion that auditors can grant,” he wrote.
In a Thursday evening interview, San Diego Unified Board President Cody Petterson said he found some of the recommendations “reasonable” — including those to note for voters that ballot measures were cumulative, and what he described as “tightening up our ballot language.”
“We’ll take a look at that,” he said. “We need to maintain close, intimate relationships with our constituents, who are the ones that are going to be bearing the burden of this, and be maximally transparent with them.”
But in response to the report’s recommendation that voters be given lists of specific projects that bonds would fund, he cautioned that they’d need to balance that clarity with ensuring the flexibility to adjust to changing priorities.
He said the district would need to examine its processes for more clarity.