I agree with your comments. Although I can not speak for the rest of the Board, what I suspect will happen is that we will first go through the process of looking at next year’s budget — which could include some severe cuts. Then it may make sense to go out for another parcel tax measure, and that would make it crystal clear what the implications of failing again would be.

Seth

I think your neighbors were being awfully shortsighted about this. That’s too bad. They don’t realize that this measure was going to replace the previous measure and b/c this measure did not pass, the San Carlos schools will have to make some tough decisions for next school year.

I am really frustrated that this measure did not pass. I did my best to talk to my neighbors and friends (w/o kids living in San Carlos.) Everyone I knew was voting “yes.” So naively I thought this measure would pass w/o a problem. If indeed some people were under this impression, Seth, I think people need to understand the direness of the situation for our schools in the next election cycle. I will be more active to support this measure in the next election.

Thanks for the feedback. To be clear, the new parcel tax measure wouldn’t have overlapped with the existing one, since it was replacing it. But I understand that folks may not have seen the urgency if they didn’t think something was “going away” if it didn’t pass. So, clearly we needed to do a better job at communicating that urgency. Again, we need to do a full analysis on this, but I do suspect one of our problems in this race was that there wasn’t that sense of immediate need for this parcel tax (and/or feeling of impending doom in its absence). Unfortunately, we may be looking at making cuts next year, and ironically that may promote a new sense of urgency and need.

Seth

They were intending to vote no on Measure S primarily because the current school bond measure isn’t set to expire for another couple of years. They said they’d be much more open to a new measure that didn’t overlap with the existing one – especially in this economy coupled with the expectation that many other taxes are likely to increase in the next couple of years. I’m not sure how prevalent that line of reasoning was in its defeat, but food for thought anyway. I’m not sure if it was the same situation for Belmont, Millbrae, or Daly City but it would be interesting to find out.

Anyway – just my two cents. I’m very disappointed that it did not pass as my kids are 2 and 4 and could benefit greatly from additional funding. Hopefully we’ll get the result we want next time out.