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Socorro School board heard a presentation from Mark Valenzuela of Bosque Advisors, a municipal advising firm, on the school bond program.
He said the district could go to voters in November 2025 for a $5 million bond election without raising taxes.
Valenzuela told the board that recent legislative change, Senate Bill 82 allows districts with 1,500 or fewer students to qualify for a 7-mill waiver without raising taxes, which could help with potential future school projects.
He advised the board that the state prefers districts to “max out” their bonding capacity, which increases the chances of getting state funding for projects.
He reported that Socorro High School is currently ranked 253rd out of around 900 buildings and might be eligible for state funding in the next few years. Valenzuela estimated the entire process of getting a new school from ranking to construction would take about five years. The district currently has about $14 million in total bonding capacity, with $11 million already in existing debt.
The board discussed potentially using this bond election to increase their “credit limit” for future projects, particularly a potential high school replacement.
“Take away for your consideration, going forward into November, the opportunity to do another general obligation bond election question, and again, it would be one that would not increase tax. So you could go after 5 million without increasing tax with the community. So that would have to be completed by the latest date, August, but more appropriately, probably in July, when the board would have to take final action on the resolution for that.” Valenzuela said.
In other business, Superintendent Joyce Gormley, in her report, highlighted High school drama students performing “Death by Design,” the Girl’s softball team’s games, the Boys’ baseball team’s wins, and A community track meet that raised at least $1,500.
The school board discussed working on their goals and guardrails before their board self-evaluation and agreed to have a work session on April 16th at 11:30am to discuss student outcome-focused governance, draft district goals and guardrails for future adoption, and discuss a board self-evaluation.
The next regular school board meeting will be at 5:30 on April 28.
