Guilford County has been spending money like crazy for three years straight, but it somehow still has the best credit rating a county can have and it has lots of people who want to buy its bonds.
Those two factors helped out the county this week when it held a bond offering for $180 million in school bonds approved by county voters in a 2020 ballot referendum.
The $180 million is the final part of the $300 million in bond money in that referendum.
Once the county spends this new $180 million, it will start issuing bonds for the additional $1.7 billion for Guilford County Schools that voters approved in May of 2022.
Guilford County Manager Mike Halford – who used to be the county’s budget director and knows a lot about these things – said he was very pleased with the way the issuance of the bonds came off this time around.
“We got a very good interest rate,” he said, noting that it was 3.25 percent.
According to the manager, that meant the county gets about $13 million in savings over what county officials were predicting.
He also said there were 10 bidders that wanted to handle the bonds and that was the highest number ever – which, he added, is a good indication that people trust Guilford County’s credit worthiness.
Now that the millions are rolling in, the Guilford County Board of Education will come to the county commissioners with proposals for school construction and improvement projects that need funding, which the commissioners must sign off on before handing over the money.
Maybe $13 m to piss away as usual, not reduce taxes.
Now, if this massive expenditure for our schools, in a state where ½ of its revenue is spent on education doesn’t show some positive results and better outcome, who can we sue?
Liberals and democrats seem to think any problem can be solved by throwing money at it.
It would be nice to have our children graduate from school knowing how to read, write a cogent simple declarative English sentence and make correct change. Sometimes I would settle if they taught the the difference between the subjective and objective case in speaking.
Paying interest is not “savings”. Accounting 101.