When Aspen School District voters approved a $94 million bond in November 2020, the district was juggling a pandemic, rising housing costs impacting both current and prospective staff members, and a growing list of deferred maintenance needs across the campus.
The ballot measure promised to use the funds — which reached $114 million via interest after collection — on affordable employee housing, replacing outdated facilities and extending the useful life of existing facilities, updating security infrastructure districtwide, improving classrooms, creating flexible and adaptive learning environments, constructing a new preschool and mixed-use facility, and more. For the most part, the district completed those efforts.
But projects fell through the cracks as inflation made some more expensive, priorities shifted and previously unknown maintenance problems revealed themselves as construction got underway.
Aspen School District Director of Operations Joe Waneka discusses the installation of a handicap ramp at the Aspen turf in July 2024. Deferred maintenance and capital projects that the district had to shelve from the 2020 bond issuance are part of the ask from voters for a new bond in the upcoming November election. Aspen Daily News file
Now, after five years, the district has spent or assigned nearly all of the 2020 bond dollars and will go to voters again for a $95 million bond measure that it says will tie up the loose ends from the previous bond. It is the fourth school district bond in 20 years to go before voters.
If it passes, district leaders believe they won’t need to ask voters for that kind of help again, at least for a long time.
As the district prepares to go back to the taxpayers, it’s continuing discussions from the last bond and what it did — and didn’t — achieve.
Housing
As with the bond the district is pursuing this November, the priority of the 2020 bond was to acquire affordable housing for its staff. District leaders have said for years that the lack of affordable housing impacts how they can recruit and retain teachers and other staff.
In total, $57.4 million of the 2020 bond went toward housing acquisitions/development, new housing upgrades and existing inventory upgrades.
One year after voters approved the 2020 bond measure, the Aspen School District finalized its first major housing acquisition for seven units near the intersection of Eighth Street and West Hallam Street on the site formerly home to Poppies Bistro Cafe. The sale price was $6.6 million. Jason Charme/Aspen Daily News
“We were in the middle of COVID, and so we were really kind of cautious about whether we should go to voters, because during that summer when we were trying to figure out whether we should put that on the ballot,” said Susan Marolt, who was president of the school board in 2020 when board members voted to put the bond measure on the ballot. “There was just lots of uncertainty and there were also, at that time because of COVID, increased expenses because of social distancing and [personal protective equipment] and all of that, so that was part of what we thought about at that time too.
“But I think more broadly, we were really feeling like, aside from COVID, aside from where we were right then, we were at a place where we really needed more housing,” she added.
After the bond was issued in March 2021, the district doubled its housing stock. It acquired 60 new units to bring its inventory to 98, and is awaiting seven new ones that it purchased in Basalt to become available.
Those units were scattered across the valley, in Aspen, Snowmass Village and Basalt. Current ASD board of education members want to prioritize finding housing units closer to the school district’s boundaries to keep ASD employees closer to the district and avoid buying up ones within the Roaring Fork School District boundaries.
Nearly a year after voters approved the bond measure, the district finalized its first major housing acquisition for seven units near the intersection of Eighth Street and West Hallam Street on the site that was formerly home to Poppies Bistro Cafe. The sale price was $6.6 million.
Later in 2021, the school board nailed down acquisitions in Snowmass and Aspen: a North Ridge three-bedroom townhome in Snowmass for $959,485; a one-bedroom Waterview condo for $445,000; a Mill Street one-bedroom unit for $500,000; and two units on Main Street for $1.48 million.
A year later, the school board approved the acquisition of nine new employee housing units at the Aspen Edge Condominiums buildings at 1235 E. Cooper Ave. for about $8 million. It yielded 14 new bedrooms.
The Aspen School District board of education approved an $8 million purchase in 2022 for nine new employee housing units at the Aspen Edge Condominiums. It was the district’s largest housing acquisition using bond dollars at the time. Jason Charme/Aspen Daily News
The district is also awaiting seven units in the under-construction Basalt Midland Residences project to become available for district staff. The school board approved a $3.7 million purchase of the units in June 2024, using much of the remaining bond dollars on the acquisition. The development is estimated to be completed in summer 2026, according to the Midland Residences website.
“Housing has always been a big component of [the 2020 bond], and that will still be the case in the new bond,” ASD Controller Max Marolt said. “Any shortfalls we had in the previous bond, I would say housing was a big piece of that because real estate went up a lot during that period … but I think our priorities shifted a little more toward housing from what we originally had said that we wanted to do with that bond.”
The district sold back some of its purchases, like eight Faraway Apartments in Snowmass Village, which it flipped to the town in 2023 for $4.66 million. The units were part of a larger 18-unit acquisition, which the district bought from the Timbers Club for $10.5 million in March 2023. The district sold eight of those units because the existing deed restrictions on them prevented district employees from moving in.
Deferred maintenance
After housing, deferred maintenance took up the next-largest share of the 2020 bond dollars.
About $40.7 million in deferred maintenance was addressed across the district’s campus. That included new flooring and roofing, HVAC repairs and replacements and more.
But as the district began addressing deferred maintenance, problems kept arising. It was one of the reasons some projects were put off or abridged.
An Aspen School District bus parks at the bus barn along Maroon Creek Road. The bus barn is nearing the end of its useful life and was touted as one of the projects the 2020 bond measure could tackle, but ultimately fell by the wayside as other projects grew to be more expensive. Jason Charme/Aspen Daily News
ASD Director of Operations Joe Waneka said some problems were larger than they initially thought, like crumbling sewage pipes at the high school. They were discovered in summer 2023 and emanated unpleasant smells in the school’s science department.
“They’re trying to fix it, but next thing you know it’s now penetrating all the way into the kitchen,” Waneka said. “So that simple $500,000 fix is now $2 million.”
But as the district made repairs, it upgraded to some better technology to increase the longevity of the items it was repairing, Marolt said. The boilers at Aspen Elementary School were overdue for replacement, so the district replaced them with electric boilers, for example.
The district also repaired the outdated roofs of the elementary, middle and high schools, giving them a new 20-year lifespan, Waneka said.
Carpets were fully replaced in the elementary and middle schools, but with the price of carpet doubling in the past year, the district had to postpone making the same replacement at the high school, Waneka said.
The district spent the past year compiling a facilities master plan, a document that outlines both small deferred maintenance work and large-scale capital projects. It was borne partially out of the desire to have a working document with all of the district’s facilities needs, in hopes that unexpected maintenance projects could be avoided in the future.
It outlines costs for certain projects, but also repair costs needed by school; the elementary and middle schools each would require $2.25 million in maintenance and the high school would require $5.25 million, according to the master plan.
“We probably have another two, three years before we need to replace [the carpet at the high school] again,” Waneka said. “Now we’re on that proactive approach versus reactive, so it’s a whole different feeling.”
Aspen Middle School received roof and carpet replacements among other projects using funding from the 2020 bond. Jason Charme/Aspen Daily News
Those projects would likely be funded outside of a bond, but others outlined in the plan — like an $11.8 million transportation center or a $31.6 million athletics fieldhouse — could be part of a future bond. The document is “a multiple bond issue kind of master plan,” Patrick Johnson, an architect with Treanor that put together the master plan, told the school board in March. Future board members can use it to gauge community sentiment on such projects.
In addition to deferred maintenance, the district spent $7.2 million updating the classroom and learning environments. It also spent $6.8 million on safety upgrades across the campus, like new door locking software.
What got cut
The Cottage, the district’s preschool in a modular building unit near the high school, was the main project that fell by the wayside. District leaders had aspirations of constructing a new preschool with more resources, and moving preschool students out of the smaller modular building into bigger classrooms.
In all, it received about $373,000 in bond funding, but was once earmarked for $20 million in attention, the Aspen Daily News previously reported.
District leaders weighed whether to include The Cottage in a new bond ask — in 2024, the school board was considering pursuing a $175 million bond measure, but backed off that plan due to an already crowded ballot and a desire to flesh out its capital needs further.
Since then, the district moved the early learning classrooms to a permanent home in the elementary school, solving the need for a new early learning center, ASD Superintendent of Business Mary Rodino said.
“We’ve been able to accommodate the need and move them into a more efficient building so that all the operations for early learning child care are in one location,” she said.
While the district and school board debated what financial measures it needed to go to voters for, they also engaged in serious cost-cutting efforts to make up for the district’s reserve balance depleting 75% over five years. The district cut positions through attrition, which accounted for $1 million in savings, and made other small operational cuts to help boost its reserve balance.
Four full-time equivalent positions at The Cottage were eliminated, but three of the four Cottage employees were transferred within the district.
Some administrative offices moved from the district office to The Cottage building in place of the early learning classrooms.
Upgrades to the Aspen District Theater — located inside the elementary school — were not promised in the 2020 ballot language, but have long been discussed as potential bond projects. Creative arts and music program instructors told the school board in 2020 that the theater needed repairs and upgrades, and should be included in a bond issue, the Aspen Times reported in 2020.
A $33 million district bond campaign that passed in 2005 included remodeling the theater, but those upgrades never happened.
About $2 million from the 2020 bond issue were spent on small District Theater upgrades, but any larger changes were off the table because of other spending priorities.
Replacing the district’s bus barn was another project district leaders hoped the 2020 bond would cover, but was ultimately not realized. The bus barn is nearing the end of its useful life, and a new transportation center is one of the projects outlined in the district’s facilities master plan.
Fourth school district bond in 20 years
The school district will ask voters to approve its fourth bond issue in 20 years in November. Before the 2020 bond was passed, voters approved a $12 million bond in 2008 to address staff housing needs and a $33 million bond in 2005 for facility upgrades.
District leaders want this one to be the last bond going before voters for the foreseeable future. While the previous $114 million made a significant dent in the district’s housing needs, it does not yet have enough housing to meet its staff members’ needs.
A survey conducted by the district last year showed that the district should focus on housing about 70% of its employees, rather than its previous goal of housing 100% of employees in district-owned units. ASD needs 31 additional units to meet the current needs and another 24 in the next five years to keep up.
The ASD board approved bond language for the November ballot during an Aug. 20 special meeting. If approved by voters, the bond will mostly go toward acquiring and constructing housing, but will also be used for improving instructional and career and technical education spaces, athletic facilities, renovating the bus barn, and upgrading the District Theater, including restrooms and ADA improvements, according to the ballot language.
The board landed on $95 million after a survey of voters earlier this year found that they would be much more likely to approve another bond if it was under $100 million.
The estimated annual cost of the $95 million bond per $1 million of actual home value in the district’s boundaries is $65. It is one of four tax measures to benefit the school district that will be on the November ballot (no voter in the district boundaries will see all four questions on their ballot).
Voters will also be asked to increase the district’s mill levy override amount from 25% to 47%, increasing the estimated annual cost per $1 million of actual home value by $62.
City of Aspen voters will be asked to extend and increase an existing sales tax from 0.3% to 0.6%. The total cost of all ballot initiatives in the city per $1 million of actual home value is an estimated $127. The cost of the Aspen Public Education Fund sales tax is dependent on how much is spent within Aspen city limits.
Town of Snowmass voters will be asked to extend and increase an existing property tax to collect about $1 million annually, up from $500,000. The total cost of all ballot initiatives in Snowmass per $1 million of actual home value is estimated to be $164.
Unincorporated Pitkin County voters in the school district’s boundary will only see the mill levy override and bond — the estimated total cost of those two initiatives per $1 million of actual home value is $127.
Election Day is Nov. 4. Ballots will be mailed to registered voters on Oct. 10.
