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A spokesman at Rice University, when called, implied that the results of the poll would not be made public. Perhaps there's a reason for that, but I can only guess at what it might be.

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When the Bond Committee was meeting, they invited two of the Katy Watchdog$ to appear before them. I urged the two not to go, but feeling that they could defend the Watchdog$ opposition, they went anyway. They were supposed to speak for a few minutes. It turned in to an Inquisition that lasted for hours. Every liberal huckster that was there, got to take pot shots at them. And to their credit, they both stood there and took it. THEY were the winners because THEY were doing the honorable thing by appearing and speaking. The bond committee members acted like thugs.

I wrote a retort to the Committee, but no one would let me post it!

So here it is a bit late, but still pertinent.

There are seven Watchdog$ leaders, Chris Cottrell, Kevin Tatum, Jon Lange, A. D. Muller, Fred Hink, Tom Law, and Mary McGarr. We are six dads and a grandmother. We all have a college degree; we all have children, we all have children that have attended KISD schools; we pay our taxes; we have nice homes IN the District; we all have spouses that put up with us and our cause, which is to reign in overspending by the school district, stop excessive taxations, restore academics to the curriculum, and monitor activities of the District that relate to those issues.

We have always answered questions regarding our position, but voters must remember that none of us were allowed to be members of the Bond Committee even though some of us were nominated by Trustee Tom Law to be placed on the committee.

Because we were excluded, we have not had the same access to the District's information that the committee members enjoyed. While copies of Q&A, and other information may be on line, we did not get to ask the questions and sometimes when the committee members asked the questions during the meetings, we could not hear the answers from our seats in the back of the room. Those facts put us at a distinct disadvantage.

We were initially told we could send the committee members emails and provide them with information. Then we were told we could not distribute information, even though the president of the school board, Judy Snyder, told Mr. Law that we COULD. Dr. Merrell has been quoted as saying he was going to put Watchdog leaders on this committee, and then he changed his mind. We are confused as to who is running this school district, the superintendent or the Board of Trustees. Also, please remember that we already had the email addresses of most bond committee members, but we respected the dictums of the superintendent.

We noted that in the initial meeting of the Bond Committee (which was unannounced in the media), that the committee set up ground rules, and one of those was that members would "talk about ideas, not personalities," but some of the Watchdog$ have been at every Bond Committee meeting, and it appears that members have chosen to ignore their own rules as the Watchdog$ have been vilified by a great many of the committee members. Even at the last meeting, the Q&A was printed with this comment: "To the rotunda question, why don't we build square schools? (Let's get their silly questions asked.)" We think such comments were meant to belittle each of us, and members should all be ashamed of themselves for allowing these comments, both oral and written, to occur.

We have noted during the course of these summer meetings that committee members have been told that 1) the District only needs 20 of the portable buildings when they tried to float 30 in the spring bond, that buses that are being requested cost much less than the District told the public in the spring bond, that the demographic estimates by PASA may be off by + or - 9% which one of the members pointed out would be 4,000 students for just one year and much more for five or ten year projections, and the District has removed the questionable roof repairs for McDonald Junior High and Katy Junior High from this bond since they are apparently still under warranty. All of these matters prove to us that the spring 2006 bond was indeed padded, and we think members need to ask themselves what else might have been padded, because most of these things were items that a Watchdog member revealed, and unless we had been out here pointing out flaws in the presentations, there would still be 30 portables, expensive buses, bad demographic information floating about, and roofs being seen as needing bond money for repair when they are still under warranty!

The District has not followed our suggestion that all members of the bond committee be listed on the web site with their names and work history and any affiliations with the schools such as was done by the Round Rock ISD superintendent. Since committee members are substituting their authority for that of the School Board in this matter, we also believe that a statement with regard to any of committee members having done or intending to do business with the District needs to be made public, just as the school board members must declare any conflict of interest they have that might compromise their position and decisions when discussing school matters or voting on them. We have also asked for a Bond oversight committee to be established as was done in Austin ISD to monitor spending over the next three years of the bond period. We don’t trust the administration. They have not given us reason to trust them. The committee should have had the right to decide on these matters if they were going to spend all this time on it. The public has a right to know who has taken over the decision making process of their elected representatives. As everyone knows by now, the Watchdog$ believe that floating a bond is one of the most important decisions that a Board has to make, and they are the ones to whom all of this information should have been directed. We are happy that some of the board members have attended most of these meetings; we note that not all of them did, and very few of them attended the meetings in the spring.

The Mayde Creek pool was placed on the Spring bond with the specific and only reason being that it leaked. Now the leak has been repaired, but a whole array of new reasons for rebuilding this pool have arisen! A bond committee cannot second guess a Board decision to build Mayde Creek’s pool in the manner that they did in the early 1980‘s.

Bill Moore has said that the tax base is growing by $1BB per year and he has forecasted that this growth is expected to continue over the next 10 years. With a $1.50 tax rate, that's an additional $15MM in additional revenue for the district every year. Correct my math if it's wrong. The actual tax rate is less than this in the near term. We don't know at this point how much of the shortfall will be made up by the business tax. Let's assume for the sake of this exercise that the business tax will keep the district's effective tax rate at 2 percent so our district can expect $20MM of new revenue based on our tax base.

We expect 3000 new students every year. At a cost of $7,000 per student, we are increasing our expenses by $21MM every year. We know that $7,000 is a little high, but the cost per student will quickly pass $7,700 over the next 10 years.

It appears that this district is not prepared to pay for the ever increasing costs of maintenance and operations. If we can't pay for our everyday expenses, how can we have faith that our debt will be paid off? Remember that this is our debt, not the district's debt. We don't believe that our bond committee is thinking in terms of this is our money and debt that we are talking about. This is not the district's responsibility to pay it off. It is the taxpayer's responsibility in the end.

There will be no choice but to continue to increase the debt service portion of the tax rate to what? 0.50? 1.00? When is too much going to be too much?

These particulars should be communicated to the bond committee.

When one asks what we would cut to fund some of these things, we can think of several things.

First, the district has a program called “Project Pride.” Project Pride is an early literacy intervention program providing intensive, individual help for children having difficulties in learning to read, but most empirical research shows that it does not help long term.

Mary McGarr has a standing open records request from 1996 to receive any appraisal that is made of this program. To date, she has not received one. The Reading Recovery program, which our district copied and called Project Pride, has had much research done on it, and the research that was done by those without a vested interest in keeping it, shows that it is a program that does not work.

The Katy ISD Board, at the behest of the superintendent, in the mid 1990's started this program by funding one teacher at each elementary school to implement the program. The initial cost when there were half as many elementary schools as we now have was $1,400,000 per year. Think of that amount doubled and having been in existence for ten years and being a program that doesn’t work!

The Watchdogs believe that there are probably lots of programs like that where dollars are spent in a wasteful manner. We get calls all the time from people who have worked in the district who want to tell us of the waste. We have no reason not to believe them.

The District tries to tell the committee that the costs of the new schools are comparable to other districts, but here's a chart that shows something else:

Exhibit 5-9
Comparative School District Construction Cost
and Projected Costs
ClearCreekISD and Houston Area School Districts
2001 through 2004

	Per Square Foot Construction Cost By School Type
School District	Elementary	Middle	High
Alief		$94.86 (3)
CCISD	$90.23 (1)	$95.58 (2)
Cypress Fairbanks	$94.80 (2)	$95.80 (1)	$97.60 (2)
Katy		$98.90 (1)	$107.00 (4)
Conroe	$97.40 (2)	$96.67 (1)	$105.00 (1)
Fort Bend	$102.80 (1)	$102.77 (1)	$101.93 (1)
Humble			$109.38 (2)
Spring	$116.38 (3)	$93.31 (3)

We are already in debt so far that we pay higher taxes than almost anyone in the state because we are already at our tax rate cap of $2, and we have the lowest homestead exemption amount that they can give ($5,000). Some districts, like Cy-Fair ISD give a 20% homestead exemption :

*Taken from the Cy Fair ISD web site

Our bond debt will have gone from $240 million in 1996 to 1.5 BILLION in 2006 even though the number of students has not increased 100%. That is an over 600% increase in the bond debt.

Our district has moved from 8 years of RECOGNIZED to the last 2 years being only ACADEMICALLY ACCEPTABLE.

Word on the street is that the new elementary school, Griffin, was outfitted with Teakwood countertops and cabinetry. What ever happened to the much more thrifty laminate that all the other schools use? We're not sure if Teakwood versus laminate adds to a student's ability to learn. Perhaps someone has done a study?

A school district that has gone from $123,096,824M (1995) to $1,406,529,844B (2006) needs to slow down its construction spending especially when there are six existing schools with occupancy rates below 75% and only 6 of its 44 schools are filled to capacity.

An irresponsible Board passed its authority for its only major decision in three years to a questionably selected committee- most of whose members failed to show up regularly for the meetings.

Paying for eleven maintenance items in the Bond with long term debt is fiscally irresponsible.

Eleven million dollars for land purchases to accommodate developers who need schools to lure customers is not the responsibility of taxpayers and crosses the line of using public money for private use.

An expense of 2.3 million for high definition television sets so students can watch the morning announcements in high resolution is absurd.

At the Board meeting where this major decision to have a bond election was made, one board member asked NO questions, most questions that WERE asked were naive and lacking substance, and one board member (Joe Adams) was not present for the vote.

The security cameras installed in 1993 cost $124,000; a "security camera infrastructure" thirteen years later of $6,200,000 appears excessive. The superintendent used the "security" measures as a hook for votes. He had plenty of money to put security measures in place BEFORE the bond election if the needs were so severe. He even had a parent who was willing to fund part of the cost as a gift to the District.

When the District puts out statistics that show its buildings' costs are in line or even less than other districts around Houston, what doesn't get said is this: our school district and all the others were building schools for eight million for an elementary, twelve million for a junior high and thirty seven million for a high school in the late 1990's. By 2003-2006, an elementary school cost fourteen million, a junior high cost twenty one million and a high school cost seventy-seven million. Those are HUGE increases that cannot be justified. As said earlier they are due to increases in architect's fees, arbitrary and in-house manipulated raises in the inflation percentage, and use of probably unnecessary construction personnel and materials. When Katy ISD hooked up with PBK and SVBW and dumped Goleman and Farrel/Sundin, that's when the change occurred. As soon as higher architect's fees and increased inflation fees got by the Katy taxpayers, with Superintendent Merrell's statewide connections allowing him to spread the word, pretty soon every school district in the state was hiring PBK or some other over priced architect to design outlandish schools. And parents who didn't know any better, began to equate fine buildings with fine educations. Using the excuse that "parents expect fine buildings" to justify such largesse is bogus.

What parents didn't and still don't understand is that fine buildings are in keeping with the education reform movement the purpose of which is academically dumbing down all our children while at the same time pumping up their self esteem. Part of that self esteem for a child comes from being able to get up every morning and go spend the day in a lush building so that he doesn't mind being politically indoctrinated. It's all by design, so to speak.