The Jacksonville School District 117 Board of Education took the next vital steps towards a new school school building in the Murrayville-Woodson area at their January 15th business meeting.
The board approved an underwriter for the selling of the 2015 bonds to secure funding for the new construction project in the Murrayville-Woodson area and also approved the sale of those 2015 bonds to move forward financially.
Superintendent Steve Ptacek says that the district’s municipal accounting group PMA recommended J.P. Morgan over three other accounting firms for the low bid of just over $78,000 to underwrite the bonds: “The underwriter is the company that actually is in charge of the bond sale itself. PMA, who is our municipal advisor – they don’t sell bonds but advise us through this whole process and have a legal team to make sure that we are doing the whole bond sales correctly – they put out a request for proposal to different underwriter companies and they analyzed their past performance on similar type bond sales, what their actual fees for doing that are, and came out and gave a recommendation for J.P. Morgan that we use for this bond sale. When you have a $31 million total bond sale, a portion of that is going to be paying off the 2015 bond, refinancing that bond. It is definitely a large enough bond that they wanted to have a company that has experience in that size of a bond and has a proven experience, and experience in government-issued bonds. At the cost rate, J.P. Morgan was the obvious choice.” The next closest bidder was over $30,000 higher.
Ptacek says that the bond sale is similar to refinancing a home. The term of the loan will be the same as the 2015 bond, but the payment will be somewhat higher in order to garner enough money to build the new school building in the Murrayville-Woodson area.
Ptacek says the sale could generate between $13-16 million towards the project, which he expects to cost approximately $20-21 million to complete. Ptacek says the difference will have to come out of the district’s fund balance, which he says is ready to absorb the costs: “We’ve been increasing our fund balance over the time, knowing that we have limited bonding options. The plan originally was to hopefully one day be able to do renovation of a school just out of fund balance. Now this new bond sale opportunity came in, and with that and the money we’ve been setting aside to do a renovation combined together – we have the opportunity to build a new school.”
Ptacek says the bond sale will take place in March. Next week, Ptacek is meeting with representatives from architect firm Graham Hyde to begin laying out the design of the new school as well as continued discussions about land acquisition.