Elmbrook Schools' $100 Million Ask Comes With A Tax Rate Called 'Competitive Within Top Three'

WAUKESHA — Elmbrook School District officials unveiled a $100 million facilities referendum Tuesday night, the largest spending measure in district history, and spent a good portion of the presentation explaining why the resulting tax bill should be understood less as a cost and more as a placement.

District Finance Director Roger Kinsella walked a packed auditorium through 14 slides on HVAC units, roofing membranes, and bond amortization schedules before arriving at the number everyone had been waiting for: approximately $47 per month for the average household. Rather than round it to '$564 a year' or 'about a cup of coffee a day, if the coffee were $1.55 and you drank one every day for a year,' Kinsella described the figure as placing Elmbrook in 'the upper competitive tier within county burden metrics.'

He did not specify how many districts made up the tier, whether the ranking was published anywhere outside his own slide deck, or what the lower competitive tiers looked like. When a resident in the fourth row asked what 'top three' the district was supposedly competitive within, Kinsella said the comparison was 'directional' and moved to the next slide, which showed a roof.

Seven buildings, one spreadsheet

The bond, which goes before voters Nov. 5, would fund upgrades across seven schools in the district, including HVAC replacements and roof repairs that Superintendent Dr. Michelle Chen described, through a district spokesperson, as 'overdue in the way a car's fourth timing belt is overdue, meaning previous administrations also knew.' Chen did not take questions directly Tuesday; a district communications aide fielded them from a table near the exit.

District communications coordinator Patty Vrabec, 44, stood in for both Chen and Kinsella during the public comment period and answered most questions by restating the $47 figure in a new unit of measurement. Asked about total project cost per square foot, Vrabec said it worked out to 'less than a large soda at seven of the nine movie theaters within a 20-minute drive.' Asked to clarify which seven theaters, she said she would follow up by email and did not take anyone's email address.

"We ran the math six different ways and every single way it came out sounding better than 'tax increase,' so we went with the one about rankings."

— Patty Vrabec, district communications coordinator

The 387-household survey

Kinsella's presentation leaned heavily on a preliminary district survey of 387 households, which found 68% support for the measure if it were limited strictly to buildings and grounds. The survey did not ask respondents about support levels for a measure that was not limited to buildings and grounds, a scenario Kinsella called 'outside the scope of what we tested, intentionally.'

Resident Carl Dziuk, 58, who attended with a printed copy of the survey questions, said he counted the word 'competitive' used nine times across the 22-minute presentation and the word 'tax' used twice, both times in the phrase 'tax impact statement' rather than as a standalone noun. 'I'm not against the roofs,' Dziuk said. 'I just want someone up there to say the word tax like it's a tax.'

District officials confirmed the roofs in question are original to the buildings' construction and have each been patched at least four times since 2009, a detail included on slide 9 under the header 'Context, Not Alarm.'

Two more chances to ask about the roofs

The district has scheduled two community feedback sessions ahead of the vote, Tuesday, Oct. 22, and Thursday, Nov. 1, both billed as opportunities for residents to ask questions 'in a smaller setting,' though the format, room size, and seating arrangement for both sessions had not been finalized as of Tuesday night.

Vrabec said the district expects the Oct. 22 session to run shorter than Tuesday's meeting 'now that most people already have the ranking language,' and added that handouts for the Nov. 1 session would include a version of the tax chart 'without the word tax on it, to reduce confusion,' before clarifying she meant the word would simply not need repeating since residents would already understand the chart by then.

Ballots for the Nov. 5 referendum will list the measure as a straightforward yes-or-no on $100 million in general obligation bonds. District officials said they have no plans to include competitive-tier language on the ballot itself, citing printing cost and, according to Kinsella, 'ballot real estate we'd rather spend on the roofs.'