Anybody surprised the San Diego School district, or any government school district LIES to the public by omission? Mostly they LIE by commission—now a Grand Jury has found SDUSD lying to the public about bonds.
“Much of the report chastised San Diego Unified officials for a lack of clarity about bond measures’ impacts on property taxes and the overall debt incurred by the subsequent measures.
The grand jury found that while all four bonds included the maximum increase to property tax rates, the latter two measures used “vague language,” that “obscured the fact that property tax rate increases are cumulative.” In other words, the ballot language approved by district officials did not make clear that each new bond measure approved could potentially increase property tax rates.
“SDUSD has consistently failed to inform voters of previous property tax rate increases associated with prior SDUSD voter-approved bonds when placing new bond initiatives before voters,” the report reads.
The grand jury also found a similar lack of clarity when it came to how much taxpayers would have to fork over to pay down the debt accrued by the bonds.”
In 2024 several Ventura County’s school districts wanted bonds. The money they said would be used for construction, equipment, etc. But when you read the bond measure EACH said the money was going into the General Fund! Vote NO on school bonds until the government is willing to tell the truth.
Grand Jury Finds Faults in San Diego Unified’s Bond Program
Among the report’s findings, the grand jury concluded the district had ‘consistently failed to inform,’ voters of bond-induced tax rate increases or provided detailed lists of projects.
by Jakob McWhinney, Voice of San Diego, 5/22/25 https://voiceofsandiego.org/2025/05/22/grand-jury-finds-faults-in-san-diego-unifieds-bond-program/
California school districts have long faced an unenviable bind: the collective price tag to maintain the structural integrity of their facilities, let alone to modernize or rebuild them, amounts to billions of dollars each year. State aid, meanwhile, makes up only a fraction of the funding needed for such projects. So, districts have increasingly turned to local bonds to fund the majority of their facilities needs.
While bond measures can be a hard sell for voters in some areas who are wary of the property tax hikes they carry, over the past 17 years, San Diego Unified has seemed to crack the code. Despite spending some bond money in eyebrow-raising ways, and practically duplicating elements of the rationale of their last few bond pitches, voters have approved four of the four bonds the district has put on the ballot.
Altogether, the bonds have raised $11.6 billion in funding for facilities.
But a new report from San Diego County’s grand jury flags some concerns about the way the district has conducted its bond program. Here are a few takeaways.
Tax Rate and Debt Service Sleight of Hand
Much of the report chastised San Diego Unified officials for a lack of clarity about bond measures’ impacts on property taxes and the overall debt incurred by the subsequent measures.
The grand jury found that while all four bonds included the maximum increase to property tax rates, the latter two measures used “vague language,” that “obscured the fact that property tax rate increases are cumulative.” In other words, the ballot language approved by district officials did not make clear that each new bond measure approved could potentially increase property tax rates.
“SDUSD has consistently failed to inform voters of previous property tax rate increases associated with prior SDUSD voter-approved bonds when placing new bond initiatives before voters,” the report reads.
The grand jury also found a similar lack of clarity when it came to how much taxpayers would have to fork over to pay down the debt accrued by the bonds. The voter information provided by the district for the 2008 and 2012 bonds approved by voters did not include the sum that would need to be paid back.
The latter two bonds did include totals in the voter information guides. For 2018’s Measure YY, the total was about $7.5 billion of debt for the $3.5 billion in bond money. For 2022’s Measure U, the total to be repaid was $7.3 billion for $3.2 billion in funding.
But the less thorough ballot summary provided to voters, which is often all a voter reads before making a decision, contained less information. For Measure YY, district officials wrote they would be repaying an average of $193 million per year over the bond’s 39-year term.
The ballot summary for Measure U was even more vague, the report notes. For that summary, San Diego Unified “again reverted to an annual number, this time $330 million ‘annually while bonds are outstanding’” so the voter couldn’t calculate the total if they tried,” the report reads.
That led the grand jury to conclude that district officials had “failed to provide total debt service in some bond initiatives placed before voters, and in summary ballot language has obscured the total amount of debt service by providing an annual estimate only.”
Also included in Measure U authorization for San Diego Unified officials to seek a waiver that would allow officials to issue bonds worth more than the state cap. Currently, California law only allows districts to issue bonds up to 2.5 percent of a district’s assessed property value. That aspect of Measure U was omitted from the ballot summary. The grand jury recommended the district inform voters whether officials would seek that waiver.
Unspecific and Duplicative Funding Priorities
When I wrote about Measure U back in 2022, the ballot measure’s lack of details about the district’s bond spending priorities stood out to me. Previous bond measures had much more fleshed out lists of funding priorities that included school-specific projects, something required by California law.
That change also stood out to the grand jury. They wrote noted that with Measure U, the district “abandoned the school-specific list of projects and offered only the generic umbrella categorization of work that could be financed by the bonds, without giving voters information about which specific schools would benefit.”
When I asked district officials about the change back in 2022, Samer Naji, the district’s facilities communication supervisor, wrote in an email that they’d slimmed down the descriptions to make things simpler for voters.
“Past stakeholder questions indicate listing similar scope for each school was confusing. The Measure U resolution remedies this complexity issue by listing scope of work covered by the bond districtwide at all schools, which will also simplify and shorten the voter guide, making it more accessible to voters,” Naji wrote.
Another thing that jumped out at me about Measure U, and many of the district’s previous bond measures, was just how eerily similar they looked. Many of the funding priorities – whether they be improving campus safety or getting lead out of water – even the language in the bond measure names, was either identical, or bore a striking resemblance to language from previous bond measures. This, too, was not lost on the grand jury.
“Where school specific projects are listed, they are regularly duplicated from one bond proposal to the next,” the report reads.
What may be most frustrating is that even if multiple bonds have promised the same improvement, in almost identical language to boot, that improvement hasn’t necessarily been realized.
Take air conditioning, for example. Every San Diego Unified bond dating back to 2008’s Prop S has pledged to improve district air conditioning. Attentive readers may notice some slight similarities in the language.
2008: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”
2012: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”
2018: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”
2022: “Replace or modify aging heating, ventilation and air cooling systems with energy-efficient heating and air cooling systems (HVAC), including installing energy management systems.”
Still, air conditioning problems are a yearly occurrence at district schools. Just last year, a 9-year-old at Garfield Elementary was taken to the hospital after sweltering classroom heat due to a busted air conditioning made it hard for them to breathe.
Concurrent, Commingled Bond Programs
The $11.6 billion in bond funding voters have approved over the past 17 years is an eye-popping sum. What some voters may not have realized when they voted for 2022’s $3.2 billion Measure U, is that the district still has literally billions in unissued bonds left over from its previous bond measures. About $3.2 billion to be exact.
The report found the district has not historically informed voters “of any outstanding unissued bonds before being asked to authorize new ones.”
The fact that the district has kept going to the ballot box before the previous bonds ran dry means that the district is now concurrently executing four bond programs dating back to 2008. Beginning in 2012, the district merged the project lists of the freshly passed Prop Z and 2008’s Prop S. Officials have continued that practice to this day.
That means, as the grand jury found, “a single school project can involve funding from all four bond programs simultaneously.” The grand jury report noted that the practice weakens the argument that each bond program is actually leading to the specific benefits it advertises.
“It also makes it more difficult to hold SDUSD accountable to voters,” the report reads.
San Diego Unified’s Response
In an emailed statement, Lee Dulgeroff, San Diego Unified’s facilities, planning and construction head, insisted that district officials had operated its bond program with transparency. Annual audits have earned the program the “highest opinion that auditors can grant,” for the past 13 years, Dulgeroff wrote.
“Thanks to San Diegans we have completed 257 major projects to renovate and rebuild aging school facilities over the past 16 years, turning them into high quality learning environments for our students,” he wrote. “All of our work is subject to rigorous public oversight by an Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee.”
Still, Dulgeroff added, officials will consider the grand jury’s suggestions, respond to the report within the 90 days required by state law and continue to “cooperate with the grand jury.”
But given the fact that the grand jury report notes that San Diego Unified officials, “failed to respond to repeated requests for documents and some interviews, impeding the conduct of this investigation,” it isn’t entirely clear that district officials were all that cooperative in the first place.
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