Most of Portland Public Schools’ buildings were built before 1960, suffer years of deferred maintenance, and almost all are seismically unsound. With all of the growth heralded with the City’s renewal, Portland Public Schools has built only two new schools in the last thirty years. This at the same time that our neighbor to the north, Seattle, has rebuilt or newly constructed virtually its entire Public School portfolio. Our schools are under funded and hugely over populated. At the same time, Portland is one of the fastest growing cities in the country with an estimated 30,000 people moving into the metro population every year. Many are settling in new developments inside the city, such as the Pearl District and the South Waterfront with families that include children particularly as the cost of housing is skyrocketing. 

We understand that real estate developers pay a one-time fee to the city of between $15,000 and $20,000 in System Development Charges per residential unit built. They also pay an additional SDC fee for commercial/retail space. These fees are over and above what developers pay for building permits, and in addition to monthly fees paid to agencies like water & sewer. This money goes to the Parks Bureau, Sewer, Water and Transportation and other infrastructure needed to serve the properties. NONE OF IT GOES TO SCHOOLS!

4500 units x $20,000 = $90,000,000. This is the approximate revenue for the current Pearl District developments alone.  This money is paid before a building even breaks ground. The City already has this money!  These funds dry up when the boom ends. These are not recurring revenues that can be applied to building school capacity.  We will be left with the thousands of new students, and no new revenue, and no place to put the schools even if the money were there. $5,847.00 of SDC dollars from each unit built goes to parks alone? And the Schools receive nothing? 

Furthermore, we are learning that the School District is unable to access funding through the City’s Urban Renewal Area (URA) financing mechanisms.  Why not? Billions of dollars have been invested in our downtown through the URA efforts with thousands of residential units being developed, but somehow we have failed to factor in the most basic measure of construction finance or allocation of real estate upon which to site public school facilities needed to directly serve them.  It is as if someone thought that in these residential units, children would somehow be completely absent.  The children, in fact, are there and in ever-increasing numbers and are leading to this crisis on the West Side of Portland.

We are one of the only metropolitan cities in the nation that doesn’t divert any of its SDC fees to the school system and this needs to change. If there are impediments to the PPS receiving its rightful share of any bondable new tax increment from the Urban Renewal Areas, City leadership need to work to remove these impediments so that these funds can be combined with PPS Bond initiatives to improve the overall portfolio.  We Portlanders love our parks, but we are funding parks and transportation while at the same time leaving our schools behind. There are a dozen construction cranes in the Pearl district, South Waterfront and Con-way blocks at this time. There are 4,454 units being built in the Chapman catchment alone with the potential for 450 plus students being added to an already overburdened population.   We have just learned that the city intends to develop the thirteen acres currently occupied by the US Post Office facility, creating a dense urban neighborhood with thousands of new residents in 700 apartment and condominium units.  But somehow there is no plan, nor has there ever seemingly been a plan, for any increased school capacity for any of the families in these growth areas. To continue with this sort of development without diverting some of the funds from the SDC fees and the dedication of increased tax revenues for School bonds to SITE and BUILD new schools for existing and incoming residents is unsustainable.

PPS is currently in the process of redrawing the boundaries of its schools in an effort to offset overcrowding throughout the city.  We can only deem the efforts to do so particularly in the high growth corridors of the East side and the Urban Renewal Areas on the West Side as necessary because of the absolute failure of the City and its Leadership over the years to provide the funding necessary to the PPS to increase capacity.  This process has been time consuming and costly. It is devastating communities that are meant to learn and thrive together, and it is not going to create any sort of long-term solution as long as unfettered growth in areas like the Northwest continue to place an undue burden on the critically overcrowded school facilities. Portland Public Schools needs to build new schools on the West Side to accommodate all the development the City and its agents has encouraged and approved. Our schools are where our children learn, grow and play.   

We, The Coalition Of Concerned Voting Parents, formally ask that the City Leadership change the allocation of SDCs and that a portion of SDC funds be used to build a new west side elementary school, TODAY, and work towards increasing PPS access to a stream of tax revenues for building additional capacity at the middle school and high school levels with the PPS’s expected Bond Measure this Fall.

(THIS PETITION DOES NOT REFLECT THE SIGNATURES OF THE PEOPLE  IN REGARDS TO THE "NEIGHBORHOODS FIRST" SLOGAN IN ANYWAY SHAPE OR FORM THAT HAS IRONICALLY ONLY SERVED TO RIP THE NEIGHBORHOOD APART FOR THE NEIGHBORHOOD KIDS IN THE SPANISH IMMERSION PROGRAM)