One of the proposals for shoring up Austin’s budget woes is to sell the AISD offices on West 6th Street. The current market value is $2.6 million. Which sounds great. But we need to be careful with this. If they sell the offices they have to find a lease. Let’s say that lease is $5500/month. Since Austin taxpayers only get $55 out of every $100 we give to AISD (the rest going to schools in rural Texas), that $5500 lease will actually end up costing Austinites $10000/month. And that’s an obligation that will exist if we ever get public school funding fixed. And remember there’s a cap on the total amount that AISD can tax. Do we really want that much money tied up in a rent payment that we didn’t have before our budget woes? That’s going into debt to get out of debt. Silliness.

What AISD should do is sell the West 6th street property and buy a cheaper property in North East or South East Austin. They might only be able to put $1 million towards the budget, but the budget will be better for it in the long run.

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Comments

ttrentham (http://www.loadedguntheory.com/blog/index.php/listblog/.html)

2011-02-11T20:43:43.000Z

The board is aware of this. The times that I’ve heard them seriously discuss it are in the context of moving the administrative positions to existing (presumably cheaper) AISD property and not leasing it elsewhere. The question, of course, then becomes which existing property is large enough and that’s where you start talking about closing an existing school to then be taken over as administrative offices. Don’t they already use some part of Becker as administrative offices? And why isn’t the entire Baker campus large enough?

Tim (http://www.loadedguntheory.com/blog/index.php/listblog/.html)

2011-02-11T20:55:30.000Z

They use it for an alternative school. I don’t know how much space they need. That’s probably not the best use of spaces, however, since Becker has the largest permanent capacity of schools in the area. We’re currently looking at boundary changes and various other options to try to keep all the schools open, but obviously if a school were to be closed to use for administrative offices it would make sense to close smaller ones.

aisdresident (http://www.loadedguntheory.com/blog/index.php/listblog/.html)

2011-02-16T01:23:31.000Z

The office also house 13 apartments which AISD collects income on of around 17K per month.