Capistrano Unified School District will put before voters in November a bond measure seeking up to $114 million to fund building and tech upgrades at aging elementary, middle and high school campuses in Aliso Viejo.

As part of Measure G, property owners in Aliso Viejo would pay an estimated $44 per $100,000 of the assessed value of their property per year for the next 30 years to repay the bonds.

The funds would be used, officials say, to tackle a range of projects to update aging infrastructure at the schools, including replacing portables, fixing leaky roofs and modernizing classrooms.

Several of the schools are more than 25 years old, “so similar to a house that needs sometimes significant maintenance and upgrades, that’s sort of where we’re at,” said Ryan Burris, spokesman for the Capistrano Unified School District.

The challenge for school officials is obtaining the millions of dollars needed for such work, since few options exist from the state for getting money specifically for facilities maintenance, Burris said. The vast majority of the CUSD’s budget is allocated toward its personnel, he added, “because those are the ones who are actually teaching children, which is the mission of our school district and any public school district in the state.”

About 2% of the district’s annual budget is typically set aside for facilities maintenance, Burris said. This year, $53 million was allocated for general and deferred upkeep.

“We have gone up to the state and said, ‘We need money for facilities,’” Burris said. “And they acknowledge that and say, ‘Pass local bond measures.’”

Voters have turned down a handful of bond proposals that the district has posed over the last several years. In 2016, a measure looking to raise up to $889 million district-wide for school upgrades failed, and four years later, two other proposed measures suffered the same fate.

Measures H and I in 2020 set about to hone in on specific communities, proposing to raise up to $120 million for CUSD’s District 2 and $300 million for District 3, respectively.

“We’ve tried different ways to approach it,” Burris said. “The bottom line is that these are investments we want to make in schools, and the only way we can do it is local bond measures.”

That this year’s Measure G targets specifically Aliso Viejo is concerning to the measure’s opponents, who say it’s not fair for the city’s residents to front the entire bill when included in the proposed upgrades are modernizations at Aliso Niguel High School, which enrolls a mix of students from Aliso Viejo and Laguna Niguel.

Mike Munzing, an Aliso Viejo City Council member who is against the bond measure, said about a third of the students at Aliso Niguel High School live in Laguna Niguel, “and under Measure G, their parents don’t pay one dime for all the improvements they’re going to put to the high school.”

Munzing is also worried about saddling his residents with more taxes amid rising costs in general due to inflation.

Those who are in favor of the bond measure argue the school upgrades are necessary and can’t be funded any other way. Meredith Drews, an Aliso Viejo real estate agent who has three kids who have gone through the city’s public schools, noted the bond repayment costs would add up to little more than $300 per year for her family. “That’s less than $1 a day to have improved conditions and opportunities at our schools, for all of our Aliso schools,” she said.

Updated schools are also good for the real estate market, Drews said.

“If you don’t have good schools, that’s something that people really look to when they’re buying a home, even if they don’t have kids, because they know how closely those two are tied together,” she said. “So good schools really equal good property values.”

Included in the bond resolution is a list of projects at eight schools that could be funded with the money. At any of the campuses, a host of improvements are authorized “if and where determined necessary,” the measure says, including classroom upgrades or new equipment for better STEM education, replacing damaged infrastructure, repairing or installing playgrounds and improving network capabilities for enhanced security or educational technology.

The measure also names projects specifically for Aliso Niguel High School, including infrastructure upgrades and constructing science and engineering labs as well as “career training facilities to prepare students for college and careers in fields such as healthcare, biomedical, computer science, robotics and skilled trades.”

Replacing portables with new classroom buildings, renovating the campus theater and improving sports facilities are also among some proposed projects.

If the measure passes, the district would be eligible to receive up to $29 million in state matching funds, the ballot measure says, which district officials would apply for, Burris noted. Since money from Measure G wouldn’t be enough to cover all the projects listed on the ballot proposal, the district has worked with community members to prioritize them, he said.

Upgrades on the high school, the oldest one among the group, would likely kick off the work, Burris said, along with other priority projects that could begin right away.

“We can’t say we’re going to do everything,” Burris said, “but at the same time, the law says that we have to put any project we’re going to work on with these funds in the bond resolution.”

The estimated tax rate to property owners of $44 per $100,000 of assessed value could go up or down “based on what happens to assessed value in the future,” Burris said. But district officials expect the cost to residents to be lower than that maximum, he added, “because we believe we have prepared conservative estimates.”

He said the recent federal interest rate hike “so far has not been significant enough” to impact the bond proceeds the district has estimated, “again because we prepared for it.”

“But if conditions get severely worse,” he said, “options available to us to help keep tax rates within the maximum include issuing fewer bonds, or delaying the issuance of bonds over time, to keep tax rates low.”

The measure, which appears on the November ballot, needs 55% of votes in its favor to be approved.

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