Belleville District 201 approves millions in sales of bonds for CAVE expansion
The Belleville District 201 Board of Education approved the issuance and sale of up to $7 million worth of general obligation bonds, over half of which will be used to fund an expansion of the Center for Academic and Vocational Excellence.
The CAVE opened to students in Aug. 2022 as the district’s alternative high school for at-risk students who study at the facility full-time and a trade school for other students who come from Belleville West and East High schools for parts of their school days to get dual-credit, in-demand vocational training.
The expansion will include a 15,000-square-foot annex along the southeast edge of the main building, Superintendent Brian Mentzer said. It will allow the district to expand its aviation and healthcare programming and establish new programming for advanced business applications and automation, manufacturing and robotics.
District 201 Assistant Superintendent Dustin Bilbruck said, after fees are applied, the district will be left with about $6.6 million to spend. Commerce Bank offered the lowest interest rates and won the bid to buy the bonds.
When it started the bidding process, the district didn’t yet have an estimate on the planned CAVE expansion. Since then, it received a high-level cost estimate of $4 million. Whatever the CAVE expansion ends up costing, the remainder of the funds provided by the bond sale will be used to support the district’s operating expenses throughout the school year, Bilbruck said.
The board also approved Kaskaskia Engineering Group in Belleville for the project management of the CAVE expansion. Kaskaskia served in the same role for the rehabilitation of the former Kings Point property that now serves as the CAVE’s primary facility, according to Mentzer.
The district has not gone to bid yet for a contractor, he said.
What are general obligation bonds and what will they cost tax payers?
Bonds are a form of long-term debt — similar to loans — issued by Illinois school districts for a variety of reasons, including to finance capital improvement projects.
School districts are the issuer, or borrower, of a bond, and a bank is usually the buyer, or lender.
The bank provides the money to the district, which then pays the bank the principal amount plus interest back over a set number of years. To pay off the debt, a district can increase its tax levy, which is the amount of its budget it certifies to be raised through property taxes.
An increase in a school district’s tax levy could subsequently increase the tax rate — the percentage each taxpayer must pay on their property value. But not always.
Because home values have increased, Belleville 201 will be able to meet its debt obligation on the bonds without increasing the property tax rate.
“We set our mind to doing this without burdening the taxpayer,” Mentzer said of the purchase and renovation of the building that now serves as the main CAVE campus, which costed about $9 million. “We’re trying to be mindful of that again.”
According to tax records from the St. Clair County Clerk, the district’s tax rate has gone down from 2.1518 in 2019 to 2.0310 in 2022. This means the owner of a house worth $200,000 was taxed $240 less in 2022 than a $200,000 house was taxed in 2019.
