As a responsible public official I feel compelled, when I see something that I feel is wrong, to express my opinion by pointing out this wrong doing to the public and identifying those responsible.
Now with regard to San Mateo High School, you know that place where we are spending our money to provide a safe state of the art school for our children. Well, the accounting is pretty much done. We have been required to do considerable additional work and spend a considerable amount of our approved bond funds just to be allowed to accomplish what we had set out to do in the first place.
The Save San Mateo High School group and our Courts have required us to spend a significant portion of our bond money to perform the following tasks, not one of which contributes to the noble goal that we have for our children.
We have had to:
Place an additional measure on the ballot and have a second election,
Provide the public outreach for ballot support through advertising and lectures,
Conduct additional environmental engineering studies and the consequent reporting,
Pay for the 18 months extension of the rental of the interim class modules,
Provide additional architectural-engineering support of the extended environmental process,
Pay for a significant expansion of our own legal costs, and
Absorb the costs for the escalation in construction due to the 18 month delay.
The best estimate of these costs that I?ve been able to get for this travesty is:
$2.2 million to be taken off of the top of the initially approved bonding and kept from being used for the education of our children.
You can thank Keith Weber and Maxine Turner along with their ?Save San Mateo High School? supporters for this delay and for this waste of our money.
I don?t know if you thought of this, but there is a group of our children, about 300, whose parents are helping pay for this exercise in futility, who fully expected to enjoy and be graduated from our new campus. They have been denied this experience.
And I am sure you?ve already heard that ?the Court? has ruled that we must also pay $297,000 in attorney fees for our environmental friends. (The initial request to ?the Court? was for over $600,000.00. Talk about professional integrity.)
That brings our total loss of funds to $2.5 million.
But there is frosting on this cake. I call it ?The Coupe de Grace?. Judge Carol Mittlesteadt said in a statement supporting her decision to award attorney fees, that:
?A significant benefit has been conferred on the public.?
Personally, I don?t know of ?any public? that has benefited from taking this $2.5 million away from our children.
This whole scenario is another example, a classic one I would say, of the selfish abuse of our environmental laws and, with the help of our courts, absolving the abusers of any accountability for their responsibility.
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