Kevin Lancaster came out of retirement last month to take a job as part-time superintendent of Camas County School District.

The 30-year former superintendent in Bliss admits he now has a very rare task.

“It’s kind of interesting that one of my duties is to come in and fail a bond, you know?” Lancaster said. “It’s kind of weird. I should be able to succeed at that, don’t you think?”

A state panel in August approved $30 million in loans for five school districts to address safety issues in aging buildings, including a $1.75 million distribution for Camas. The money comes from the Public School Facilities Cooperate Fund, created in 2006. In 19 years, the fund has only been used once due to onerous requirements. A new piece of legislation this year, House Bill 338, made it easier for school districts to access the fund — but included an unintended consequence that made one district reject the loan.

Rep. Rod Furniss, R-Rigby, co-sponsored the bill and said he plans on tweaking it this coming session.

“You have to ask the people if they’re willing to pay for it before we are,” Furniss said. “That’s the idea behind it, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense, so we’ll try to fix that.”

There are several pathways for districts to qualify for the program, which Furniss calls a “loan-grant” due to the unique way repayments are made and eventually forgiven.

Some districts, including Salmon and Payette, qualify for the loan because local bond or levy efforts did not raise enough money to address safety issues. But other districts, including Filer and Camas, have to run a bond for the same amount of the loan — and it has to fail at the ballot box.

That means in order to receive the loan, Camas voters in November will have to vote down a $1.75 million bond.

Lancaster said district employees cannot tell locals how to vote on the bond, but he thinks the word is starting to get out. The district is preparing a mailer to send out to the community.

“We’re not putting in there, ‘Yeah, if you reject it, the state pays. If you approve it, then you pay,'” Lancaster said.

It’s a weird place to be, he said. Especially since the district plans to run a supplemental levy next year to pay for salaries and supplies.

“And they have to know that that one’s legit, this one isn’t,” Lancaster said. “It’s a goofy thing.”

Helping small school districts

The intention of the bill, Furniss said, was to help Salmon School District.

A school in Salmon had fallen apart. Voters shot down bonds year after year until May 2024, when they approved a 20-year, $20 million bond to replace Pioneer Elementary. But the bond wasn’t enough to finish the project.

“The idea was to see if we could help them finish the job,” Furniss said.

The state panel in August approved a $9 million loan for Salmon.

Salmon Superintendent Jill Patton said local property taxes won’t increase to pay off that loan.

“The legislators are like, ‘Yup, we’ll do this. It’s not exactly a grant. We’re going to call it a loan, because it’ll get paid back from this other money that is state money that’s from taxes collected statewide’,” Patton said.

Rob Sepich, budget director for the Idaho Department of Education, explained the “complicated bill” in an email to Patton.

“As this grant is not a loan, bond, or lien, it does not work in the way that a loan would,” Sepich wrote. “The ONLY payment method for the grant is from the School District Facility Fund. No local funds are allowed to pay back the revolving grant.”

The program is intended to provide local tax relief, Sepich wrote, and the loan is forgiven after 20 years.

Patton said it’s a huge deal for a small school district like Salmon, with about 650 students.

“We don’t have the level of tax base — you know, Boise, Ada County, Bonneville County — all these districts in bigger areas,” Patton said, “they have a lot of industry.”

The school buildings in Salmon have garnered state and national attention. Nick News visited Salmon Middle School for a story on crumbling schools and Gov. Brad Little highlighted the need for improvements in Salmon in his 2024 State of the State address.

“We’ve all seen the pictures and videos of some Idaho schools that are neglected — crumbling, leaking, falling apart,” Little said in 2024. “In one school I visited, raw sewage is seeping into a space under the cafeteria. Folks, we can do better.”

The state loan will help address items that the district didn’t include in the 2024 bond because patrons would not support a higher tax increase, Patton said.

Those projects include a new bus shop and maintenance building, high school renovations, shared classroom spaces in the district office and repaving a shared parking lot.

“It will enable us to work towards finishing our campus, to fully implement safety protocols that are current recommendations,” Patton said. “So, it is huge.”

For Payette School District Superintendent Glen Croft, the loan scheme is a “blessing” that will help address safety issues in very old buildings.

Croft said rooms in several buildings still have asbestos in tiles and wall insulation. The district is accepting a $2.1 million state loan to remove and abate that asbestos. The funding will also update the fire alarm system in the high school.

“The state really has done a good thing here of helping districts that are in our situation,” Croft said.

But another Idaho school district opted not to accept the state loan.

The scheme is just too complicated

Filer School District trustees in August voted to run two levies in November instead of taking the $3.3 million loan the state panel approved. Just a few months earlier, in May, voters in Filer overwhelmingly rejected a $52 million bond to build a new middle school.

Similar to Camas, Filer would be required to run and fail a $3.3 million bond in November to qualify for a state loan of the same amount. Even though a much larger bond failed in May, Superintendent Kelli Schroeder said only a part of the bond qualified under HB 338.

“That amount was different than our original bond,” Schroeder said. “We would have to go back out for bond, and it would have to fail, and then we would qualify for that loan from the state.”

That’s the opposite of how bureaucracy should work, Trustee Joe Maloney said. The scheme is just too complicated for the public.

“If they voted against it and we failed it, then we still get the $3.3 million and look like a bunch of hypocrite liars,” Maloney said.

The state loan would have covered safety improvements at the high school, including ventilation in high school welding booths, but Maloney said the need for a new middle school is still there. Meanwhile, Filer voters are bond weary.

“I think we’re gonna have to pump the brakes a couple years until we mess with that,” Maloney said.