Score one for cupcakes! Bake sale beats the establishment!
Nancy Rumfelt, the one woman army at Liberty Watch, who had to have a “Bake Sale for Transparency” to raise money to pay for an open records request, defeated the education establishment. On Tuesday voters in the Thompson School District in Loveland voted overwhelmingly “no” on a $154 million property tax increase. The final tally showed nearly 61 percent of voters rejected ballot measure 3A.
Newly elected school board member Bob Kerrigan told the Loveland Reporter Herald that a lack of transparency hurt the school district’s image:
Another negative perception regarded the district’s level of transparency, Kerrigan said.
“It’s accountability. It’s where the money is going,” he said. “I known we do great things here, but right now the public perception is we struggle.”
Kerrigan, who defeated incumbent school board member and 3A supporter Karen Stockley, opposed the tax increase and even attended Rumfelt’s bake sale.
Government, especially school districts, should take notice that a lack of transparency can kill a tax increase. It happened in Greeley Evans District 6 in 2009.
[...] So here we are, almost a week after the election here in Colorado that got a lot of big people’s attention. Prop 103’s “for the kids” tax hike went down in a ball of flames. A record number of local school tax and debt elections ran headlong into defeat. In at least one case, “negative perceptions” of a school district’s level of financial transparency has been credited with bringing down a mill levy override proposal. [...]