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Walk-through tour of Lenawee County’s early-voting site
Lenawee County’s early-voting site at the Human Services Building in Adrian serves voters from every jurisdiction except Fairfield Township.
TECUMSEH — In less than two weeks, Tecumseh Public Schools officials will know if they’ll be getting a new source of funding to pay for building repair and improvement projects they want to do in the next few years.
Tecumseh school district voters will decide in the Nov. 5 election whether to approve the district’s request to create a sinking fund by authorizing a 1.75-mills property tax for five years. The school board decided to ask for a sinking fund millage to pay for repairs to the Tecumseh Memorial Community Pool building after being told by the district’s legal counsel that the state was unlikely to approve a bond proposal to fix the pool building.
The district closed the pool for about two months last fall after an initial inspection of the roof, which was done to see if it could hold the weight of new dehumidification equipment, showed corrosion on the roof’s steel structure. A closer inspection showed the corrosion was not as bad as initially thought and in December engineers told the district it could reopen the pool but recommended starting to make repairs in the next one to two years.
The pool building repairs aren’t the only project a sinking fund would cover, but that is the first project district leaders have said they intend to tackle should voters approve the millage.
If approved, the owner of property with a taxable value of $100,000 would pay $175 more per year in property taxes. The district has a calculator on its website where residents can put in their home’s taxable value and see what they can expect to pay.
The levy is expected to collect about $1.5 million annually or $7.5 million over the five years.
What is a sinking fund?
Under Michigan law, school districts are able to ask voters to approve a sinking fund that can be used for construction or repair of school buildings as well as for school security improvements; for the acquisition or upgrading of technology; for the acquisition of student transportation vehicles; for the acquisition of parts, supplies and equipment used to maintain student transportation vehicles; for the acquisition of trucks and vans used in the maintenance of school buildings; or for the acquisition of parts, supplies and equipment used to maintain those trucks and vans. It cannot be used to pay for employee salaries, classroom or office supplies, or other similar expenses.
A sinking fund millage can be for no more than 3 mills and 10 years. Tecumseh is asking for 1.75 mills for five years.
Essentially, a sinking fund supplements the annual per-pupil funding school districts get from the state. Michigan’s school funding formula — where most of the funding for schools comes from one-third of the 6% sales tax and an 18-mills property tax on businesses and other properties that are not primary residences — does not set aside money for buildings or other infrastructure. School districts can allocate their state funding as they see fit. In Tecumseh, in the past couple of years the school board has set aside 3% of its general fund to pay for capital improvements, or about $750,000.
“The board is committed to doing that for the repair, renovation, maintenance of school buildings,” Tecumseh Superintendent Matt Hilton said. “So that, plus the sinking fund would get us to where we need to be” to cover the expected projects in the coming years.
In Lenawee County, districts with sinking funds include Blissfield, Britton Deerfield, Madison and Sand Creek.
In Sand Creek, its sinking fund has been used for projects including roof and floor replacements, masonry repairs, new boilers, and electrical and plumbing upgrades, Superintendent Sharon Smith said.
Without its sinking fund, Sand Creek “would struggle to be able to make upgrades and do a lot of those improvements that we need to to take care of our facility,” Smith said. “Without that, it would have to try to come out of our general fund money, and then that would take away from other expenses that directly would affect our classrooms. So, in the end, it’s extremely helpful.”
Having a sinking fund is something Smith said she would recommend to other districts.
“I would definitely recommend to school districts, if they don’t have one that they look into it,” she said.
When a district decides to ask voters to approve a sinking fund millage, it has to use ballot language that largely meets that sample text provided in the state school law. The proposal has to keep to the generic, legal descriptions of what the money can be used for and not specific projects.
A sinking fund is different from a bond in that it is a “pay-as-you-go system that allows us to do projects year by year,” Hilton says in his presentations. The district does not pay interest on the money that is collected. It is used to pay for the projects that the school board approves.
With a bond proposal, like what the district approved to build the high school, the district borrows money by selling bonds that are then repaid to investors with interest over a longer timeframe than what a sinking fund millage is usually approved for. Bonds are typically used for new construction or major renovations.
Both bond-funded projects and sinking funds are audited annually to make sure the money is being used in accordance with state laws.
With a list of several other building and site maintenance and repairs that are expected to be needed in the next few years that are estimated to cost about $8 million on top of the $2.5 million for the pool building, the school board opted to ask voters to approve a sinking fund.
What would a sinking fund pay for?
While the ballot language is generic, Hilton and school board members have a list of work for each school building based on projections from the district’s operations director, Josh Mattison.
About $5.5 million of the expenses are for new roofs at Sutton and Tecumseh Acres early learning centers and the middle school. The roofs are inspected twice a year, Hilton told the board at its meeting Oct. 14, and they’re patched when holes are found. But the roofs are about 30 years old and can only be patched so often.
“Patching them is not a long-term plan,” Hilton said in an interview.
Other work at Sutton, Acres and the middle school include resurfacing parking lots, replacing steam pipes and removing asbestos, replacing old heating and cooling equipment, and updating computer network equipment.
Work is planned at the high school, too. Hilton said when he’s talked with some residents he’s heard references to “the new school” that turned out to be about the almost 25-year-old high school. At its age, some of its infrastructure needs work, such as heating and cooling equipment, resurfacing the driveways and parking lots, new floors in the locker rooms and weight room, resurfacing the indoor and outdoor tracks, and repairing the tennis courts.
New boilers were installed over the summer at the high school. That work was paid for with federal pandemic-relief funds. All of that money has been spent, Hilton said.
The project that led to the request for a sinking fund, the pool building repairs, has an estimated cost of $2.5 million. The work could be completed in three phases, starting at the end of the current school year. Phase 1 of the pool roof work is expected to take about 12 weeks to complete and cost about $800,000, Mattison told the board in April. It would involve draining the pool; removing the soffit, drop ceiling and ductwork along the north wall; cleaning and repairing the steel roof structure where it meets the block wall; replacing the ductwork and drop ceiling; and cleaning and refilling the pool. If the work started June 1, 2025, it would be completed around Sept. 1.
Phases 2 and 3 combined would take about six months to complete. Phase 2 would cost about $1.1 million and involves draining the pool; removing all of the drop ceiling; sandblasting, sealing and coating the steel roof framing; and replacing the dehumidification system and remaining ductwork. Phase 3 would cost about $750,000 and involves replacing the steel roof decking, insulation and roof materials.
The pool would have to be closed during that work. Hilton said the district will have a plan for how to manage that closure should the sinking fund be approved.
Community feedback
“How much will this cost me?” and “Why not use the dollars you already have?” are the main questions Hilton said he gets at his presentations in the community. He also sometimes hears about past decisions of district administration. He was hired this summer, but he has been a parent in the district since 2016 and experienced many of the changes and controversies that took place since that time.
While not discrediting anyone’s opinions about the past, Hilton said, it’s important to focus on the future.
“We need to turn our attention from the past five to 10 years to now, the next five to 10 years, and buildboth literally, literally as well as a bit figuratively, the future of the Tecumseh Public Schools, both in the physical sense of the building but also in the sense of the kind of experiences and opportunities and programs that we want for kids,” he said.
— Contact reporter David Panian at [email protected] or follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @lenaweepanian.