How much to enjoy the view?

What is your price? Is it twenty grand? Is it two grand? What is the amount of money it would take for you to put a gas and oil well in your back yard? Now imagine you make forty-five million dollars per year. Is twenty grand still as enticing? Is two grand? The reality of the situation is this: 2 weeks of 24-hour-a-day drilling, twenty years of pumping, worries and property value depreciation for wells that if we are lucky will produce twenty-thousand dollars per year for the district. But if we are like typical wells in the area, they will generate about two thousand dollars per year. Two thousand dollars added to a forty-five million dollar budget. Is that worth the drawbacks?



I hear the supporters already. They are like drones in my head. "We promised we would look for alternative revenues" Let me put this in simple terms. This is the amount of money that one $100,000.00 house in CF generates with a years worth of property taxes. This is not a viable source of alternative revenue. When we were promised a looksy at alternative revenues, I expected something like the income tax on wage earners, or the shared county sales tax, or charging a real fee for pay-to-play (current pay-to-play collections amount to about half of the athletic directors salary). Someone referred to the board as a "bunch of lay people". Sometimes it takes someone looking in from the outside to notice the waste, mismanagement, and middleman overload. There is a larger administrator to teacher ratio and administrator to pupil ratio than there was 20 years ago with twice as many students. Why do we need more management for fewer students? There is a saying I keep hearing over and over. Bad teachers become administrators, and bad administrators become consultants. There, I said it. Of course I generalize. There are some good administrators out there. We even employ quite a few. But why do administration numbers go up and up with student population declining? Remember? Student population declined to the point that we had to close two schools. And guess what? Add one more new position to the "bring 'em back" from project recovery list. I see it this way, the positive balance we ended with this year before the last minute debt was paid, could have kept Newberry and Sill open this year. I know, I know, get over it Kellie. Ironic how last week I read an article from an education organization in my packet from the district. It dealt with problems children experience when changing schools.

What I'm trying to point out is this- Whether it's putting oil and gas wells on public property, closing schools, or putting towers up in somebody's skyline, our district is making decisions that affect some peoples personal lives. Sometimes money isn't the only thing at stake. Property values, emotional well being, and being able to enjoy your own neighborhood without looking at an eye sore and worry about a safety hazard for me is worth more than the little bit of money earned or saved. And I can't tell you how angry I was writing a check to the Summit County Fiscal Officer last week knowing we had enough money left over this year to have kept my sons' school open and saved us the emotional turmoil its closing caused. And bonus for all you Kellie haters- you wouldn't be hearing my contraire views all the time. I'd have sat down and shut up.But I have learned the hard way that if you support levies and always pay your taxes on time and believe the promises made to you, you can still get screwed. I feel robbed. People living on the edge of the proposed gas and oil wells have the gun to their head right now. You could be the next victim.







Click here for more photos of local wells and the locations where our school district would like to put them.