“This bond will go a long way to ensure school districts have the necessary resources to create the best learning environments for students,” Eileen Reynolds of the California Building Industry Association, one of the groups backing the measure, said in a statement.
Voters have approved about $45 billion in K-12 and higher education borrowing since 1998. All of the measures – totaling $9.3 billion in 1998, $13.05 billion in 2002, $12.3 billion in 2004 and $10.4 billion in 2006 – were placed on the ballot by the Legislature. The pot of bond money is almost tapped out, and the state faces an estimated $20 billion backlog of applications.
Lawmakers tried to put a school bond on last November’s ballot during the final days of the 2014 legislative session. The effort fizzled as the Brown administration made clear that it opposed the legislation.
