The leadership of the APS will be needing another $617,000,000.00

To be fair; students, teachers and communities need another
$617M.

The simple truth is that the money is for a good cause.

I guess.

It is more than a little difficult to find out exactly what they
will be spending the money on.

Currently, if you wanted to, you cannot find out how much
of the last bond issue and mill levy money they spent on
their new boardroom; a still unjustified extravagance.

The leadership of the APS says they spend around 1% of their budget on administrative salaries.

They say it is less than in "comparable" districts.

1% sounds like a low number; the sound is specious.

Either a dollar is well spent, or it is not. A wasted dollar is
a wasted dollar. What percent it represents of some other
amount of money doesn't make any difference.

There are people whose job it is, to go into bureaucracies
to ferret out waste, abuse, and the practices that enable
them.

If those people looked into the administration of our trust and our treasure in the APS, what would they find?

Would they find unequivocal standards of conduct and competence?

Would they find inescapable accountability to those standards?

If they did, they could report to voters that their investment in their schools is well protected by real standards and real accountability.

That report would be a powerful tool to use in convincing taxpayers to trust them with more than a half of a billion more dollars.

You have to wonder why that survey will not be done.

Except that the investigators would not find adequate standards
and sufficient accountability.

Except that the leadership of the APS wants to hide those truths from voters.

Just recently, auditors from Meyners + Co, audited APS' Financial Division.

They found;

1. inadequate standards, and
2. insufficient accountability, and
3. inadequate bookkeeping.

They found that there never had been; adequate standards,
sufficient accountability, and adequate bookkeeping.

The leadership of the APS would have you believe that,
they are all in place now.

But you will have to take their word for it.

They will "never agree" to any audit that "individually identifies"
a corrupt or incompetent administrator or board member.

Trust us, they say. Your $617M will be kept safe from waste and abuse.

When the object is to protect 617,000,000 dollars from waste
and abuse, trusting human nature, runs a far distant second to
honest accountability to meaningful standards of conduct and competence.

If the leadership of the APS will not commission an independent review of their bureaucracy, if they will not demonstrate to us that our tax dollars will be safe,

we need to seriously consider voting down the bond issue.

If there is any other way,
what is it?