The Carson City School District Board of Trustees held a combined workshop and regular meeting on February 24, 2026, beginning at 1:30 PM. The workshop covered three special funds (debt service, capital projects, and bond projects), followed by the regular meeting which included an update on the district's strategic plan metrics, staff and student climate survey results (fall 2025), a presentation of the independent audit for FY25, and a comprehensive ‘State of the District’ overview by the superintendent.
We are going to start with our uh workshop. And so we'll go ahead and uh start with Spencer. I think we're gonna do both. All righty. Um good evening, Madam President, members of the board. Fun to be here again for another workshop with some band warm-up in the background. All right. For your entertainment this evening, I have both a PowerPoint and a handout. So and again, if as you recall from our last workshop, we kind of reviewed all the funds. Um we had these three left that are kind of related, and then a general fund and and another little one for our next workshop. Uh but today we'll be going over um our debt service fund, capital projects fund, and bond projects fund. Capital projects, capital improvement fund. It's one two names for the same fund. It gets called both. So you might see those interchangeably, including one different on the handout than what's in the uh PowerPoint. So uh these funds are a little bit different than all the others because all of our other funds are very, very salary and benefits heavy. These are very unique in that uh they're very little of those of salary and benefits costs go into these funds. So if we start with uh our debt services fund, um that's fund 400, and that's gonna be page three of your handout. Just to keep you on your toes, the handout pages are not in the order of the PowerPoint. I just want to make sure that we're keeping your your mental mental flexibility in in good shape. So what the debt service fund is, this is funded by local property tax. And it's essentially I really like the uh the analogy. It's it's to pay our mortgage, right? This this fund is collected and it's used solely for nearly solely to cover our debt service costs, which is our principal interest costs of our bond payments. So uh the health of this fund um can uh affects our ability to bond in the future. If we do have excess beyond what covers our debt service funds, then it can be transferred to pay as you go funding, which is essentially where we can transfer that to our capital projects fund and use it for the very same projects that we would for bond funding. Uh, you may recall earlier this year we did an amendment to cover to transfer $800,000 from this fund as pay you go as you go funding to cover the three buses that we had the opportunity to purchase. Um so that's an example. It's not common um that we do that. And again, some of the reasoning being is by statute we have to have 50% of the next year's um principal and interest costs available at the at the end of the previous year. So that's kind of the minimum requirement. But if we only had that, that's like having the credit card maxed out and could affect our bond uh rating for our future bonding. So there would have to be really good reasons and some prudence and a lot of good forecasting for us to take it down that low. We are currently over 100% of coverage for that. So it's in a good position, like I say, is the last couple of times we bonded, we've we've come out with favorable rating. Part of that is is is the health of and the balance of this account being more than that. 50% is required by statute. So the expenditures for this are very simple. It's uh the principal and interest for our bonds. Um again, the handout is is very similar to what we've done for the other funds that kind of shows hey, here's our salary and benefits costs. This one's unique, there's none. And then our professional services, our principal cost of 4.8 million, and our interest cost of 2.9 million. That's the annual cost for our bond servicing for FY26. In comparison to last year, that was 8.3 million, so it's kind of dropped a little bit, uh, but that fluctuates a little bit depending on how we we structure our bonds to kind of be the most beneficial for our cash flow and what we need. Uh so that doesn't mean that though that will not always necessarily drop every year. Sometimes we have some larger principal payments built in depending on the age of our bonds. Um for the revenues for this, like I say, it's a local property tax component. Um the amount that we receive comes from an estimate from the department of taxation. Uh they're very good at uh that portion of what they do and give us some really good estimates to use for our budget. Um that amount this year is 9.6 million, and then we do budget for 100,000 of earnings on investments.