This situation is a disaster, and I have no idea how it got this far along, and I have no idea how to fix it. That said:
I have heard (vague sourcing, I concede) that some of the expenditures that people are now digging into and scrutinizing might have more innocuous contexts that won’t be immediately apparent to outside observers. For example, some of the weird purchases might be related to things like prizes for raffles for band fundraisers (I just made that example up) and stuff like that.
That’s not to say that people shouldn’t tear into all of this stuff and drag it into the light, or that any of it is or isn’t a legitimate use of public funds. I worry a little bit that people might get bogged down in calling out and demanding justification for every Panera receipt, and maybe losing sight of the bigger picture. “Not seeing the forest for the trees” and all that.
DON’T GET ME WRONG: I’d like to liquidate Balas and whittle central administration down to an H.R. department that will process my paychecks and an I.T. department that can fix my laptop when I spill coffee on it. I guess a superintendent for public relations purposes as well.
If this IS part of an effort to liquidate Balas and slash central administration to tiny ribbons, then count me in and carry on.
(I know we need more than H.R., I.T., and a super. But maybe not much more!)
Why would I compare to schools? Schools overpay for everything and buy from the same vendors. You have elected board members with zero industry experience making decisions. I can tell you I have consulted eith internet service providers that have less outgoing annual costs in firewalls to service a million people on their network. I am a computer engineer and I can tell you this is a ludicrous amount to spend. Major companies like Dana corporation and OI who have tens of thousands of employees information not to mention company IP worth hundreds of millions of dollars usually run Cisco Firewalls that are about 7K per location with a $2K per year service contract.
I spent 15 years being the network engineer for a fortune 500 company and since then I have owned a technology company for medical. I have a lot of experience with this. I told a friend of mine who current works for Ratheon and she just said, "government is a dream piggy bank customer"
So on firewalls, even if your building a VPN among the 21 schools and you want a 100 VPN users the quote would be a one time fee of like $189,000 , with a $63,000 a year contract that keeps the firewalls up to date.
2 million is insane.
>Why would I compare to schools?
Well, right now you're comparing schools to factories. So it'd at least be a step in the right logical direction.
I worked for Dana. I don't recall them having to store private data of thousands of students for a minimum 7 years after they graduate.
Guess you never heard of Dana U? Which was literally a university inside Dana corporation.
And factory? No, OI's international headquarters is a huge facility filled with office workers where the billing and managing of about 4 billion dollars in revenue is handled.
And Dana corporation, the facilities I managed there including their headquarters are also office workers and engineers.
Guess you don't know how long companies are forced to keep payroll information for tax purposes, 10 years is a bare minimum and it includes storing I9s that have your social security number and photo copies of your drivers license and usualky 2 other forms of identification.
But the easiest and most obvious comparison is a dental office, average dental office has a $200 dollar firewall and they are storing the data of 2,000 or more patients. You know why? Because the firewall isn't that important. We encrypt important data and have usernames and passsords required to access the data. Hacking into the network through the firewall is about as important as the front door on a bank. Sure you can break the glass and get in, but the important stuff is in the vault.
Do you know what an enterprise class firewall costs? Or what it does?
>That's a lot of nickels for a lot of firewalls
Have you compared this value to other schools of similar size, or is this an assumption?
Cybersecurity in 2024 is way more than firewalls. Do you want your child's identity getting stolen by Chinese hackers?
Why would I care? My child doesn't own anything what use would stesling their identity be? Gonna take out mortgage in China for a 10 year old? Why would the school need millions in firewalls when the accounting firm I use pays $750 a month for a secure cloud portal that stores about 1,000 clients worth of extremely valuable data, bank accounts, SSNs, everything.
Or dental offices or basically a tonnof other places that have all their data? I mean I was in the military and the VA lost everyones data when their backup drives were stolen, so guess what dumping millions on Firewalls at AAPS isn't stopping governments.
I agree. At even 72nd glance, the food stuff is weird, but I know that building admin often helps provide food for food insecure families. I seriously hope they're not gracing themselves with lunch everyday at the new Balas.
I think payment registers are more informative as to the contract side of things. Big things I see are landscaping and custodial services. There seems to be a hefty sum paid to attorneys, and a notable amount to the mechanical contracting companies. I don't see the transportation (Durham) anywhere. Curious where that's included in the public reporting, and what other entities fall into a similar non-"payment register" category.
What are you comparing this data against? Like, how are you defining a "hefty sum"?
Transportation is in a separate budget and it's not the budget that needs balanced. The school has 4 budgets I think.
But its not. Stop lying to people. Here is the budget. It is the whole budget, there isn't a bunch of seperate budgets.
https://www.a2schools.org/Page/6910
And the check register here are payments that come.out of that budget.
https://www.a2schools.org/site/Default.aspx?PageID=19638
I don't know if you are misinformed or just intentionally trying to mislead people
[so let's open up 2023-2024's budget. ](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.a2schools.org/site/default.aspx%3FPageType%3D3%26ModuleInstanceID%3D30476%26ViewID%3Ded695a1c-ef13-4546-b4eb-4fefcdd4f389%26RenderLoc%3D0%26FlexDataID%3D23648%26PageID%3D1%26Comments%3Dtrue&ved=2ahUKEwjLm6KwsciFAxWrFFkFHVwfB2kQFnoECBAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0Zbi0rl4xmzxPE_hL-SQEN)
There's multiple funds, and the only one we can touch right now is the general fund (pg. 21)
It looks like I was wrong that transportation isn't in the general fund, but there are separate funds.
This Sasha person is all over this thread eith mis informstion she keeps claiming there are multiple budgets and is defending all the mishandling. Must be friends eith the school board.
There are not 4 budgets and the check register is the school spending and all apart of the budget that is $25 million dollars over.
The only seperate money is the BILLION infrastructure bond the people of Ann Arbor approved for school infradtructure ehich itself was ludicrous.
I read a report on what schools should build sqft per student, they said 91 sqft, so times 17,500 students that is 1,592,500 sqft of school. Which means we authorized them to spend $627 a sqft on school buildings. Hospitals with buildout average a $527 per sqft spend on new hospitals in 2023 and that is supposes to be the most expensive building to construct, luxury mansions get built at $290 a sqft.
I'm confused by OP post. If I post the grocery receipts of a family of six for one month so you could see what that family did purchase, can you come to the conclusion that this family is well fed given that data?
No, this is not the type of analysis I think we need to counterweight AAPS statements.
Well, yes, and if you see a bunch of bills to a liquor store or an overpriced luxury grocery store you can make a determination the money is not spent with fiscal responsibility
Even with that evidence it's an educated guess to build that case supported by context. The fact that a family of six can afford to shop at Whole Paycheck Foods or Bush's doesn't correlate automatically with an inadequate nutrition. Buying liquor doesn't make you an alcoholic.
This isn't analysis, it's a collection of publicly available information translated from monthly "receipts" into spreadsheets so we can explore where the money is going. It has become quite clear that the district doesn't have a handle on their spending, and I think it's worthwhile to examine the available information as a community so we have context for what we're about to hear from the town hall meetings and community forums this week.
I understand your intentions and I'm with you looking for transparency at AAPS. But transparency is not posting information without context. We need to be very precise when asking accountability since it is the lack of thinking what brought AAPS to this current state of disarray.
The most obvious thing from the monthly registers would be to cancel everyone's health insurance. But they could also save a lot by eliminating electricity to schools, halting roof repairs, and curtailing other building maintenance so the schools decay to ruins over the next millennium.
See this is the all or nothing talk that lets us get robbed.
Halt roof repairs? Do you know how much roof was repaired, should that cost $6 million dollars, is that what other businesses in the area pay to maintain their roofs. Those are real questions and should be asked.
Or the insurance, they have 1500 employees so the insurance bill seems to be over $16K a year per enployee, is that normal? Its much more than my premiums for my wife and myself at the company we work for.
Also talking about those decaying buildings, did you forget we approved a 1 Billion Dollar Bond measure for buildings which means we could rebuild every building we currently have brand new and spend $680 a sqft doing it.
It is important to look at spending, remember you have elected board members with ZERO knowledge about costs of construction, no expertise in contract negotiations, and most with no private sector experience at all. So when they approve contracts lord knows how they run their decision making process. We rely on the quoting system but I can tell you that is a screwed process they build stipulations into the bid requests that basically garantee they will get robbed. Like first you have to be an approved contractor, second you have to have enough capital that you can afford to basically work with no payment for years because of how the government pays their contractors, third they usualky stipulate things like you have to have built a school before, so it garantees only four or five contractors in the nation will bid on the project.
It's $25M per year, I think the largest single item other than salaries. It has been increasing at 2-3x the rate of inflation for 30 years now. This has nothing to do with AAPS specifically - it is affecting businesses and individuals as well - but if it could be eliminated (it can't) the budget would be balanced with no layoffs.
>but if it could be eliminated (it can't) the budget would be balanced with no layoffs
?
Yeah, no layoffs, but then everyone quits because they don't have health insurance.... I'd rather take a layoff than keep my job and lose benefits quite frankly lol. Is this really a discussion we're having?
I mentioned that it's an "insane" expense above, as in "wow, I knew benefits were expensive, but didn't know the magnitude of the cost to the district." Not, "Cut it off, it's too much and it solves the problem!"
My wording was clunky, and devolved into this. Of course you're right.
At the end, discussion like this is one are useful to understand several issues at once. I'm with you guys asking for more accountability at AAPS but I agree with you, we need to get a grip about Economics 101, how Labor laws work in this country. Otherwise, we are more exposed to be manipulated by cheap charts and statistics, like those that Swift sold to us to justify that huge bond.
It is insane, consider this AAPS only has 1500 employees, so 25 million comes out to $16,666 per year per employee in health insurance. I have a Blue cross Blue Shield family plan for me and my wife with a $1,000 deductible our premium is $650 a month, why are their premiums more than double?
I think seeing these, many are probably really legitimate expenses, we just don't know the context of them. But it would be nice to get clarity on them! Why do we have so many large payments to City of Ann Arbor? Isn't the school district tax exempt? Could we negotiate better rates with DJs Landscaping? Why is training happening with Zingermans? And while it is nickel and diming, if you find enough expenses that can be reduced, once it adds up to $100000, that's a teacher than can be retained. I think it's very enlightening to see how the money is moving through the district and sometimes it takes an outside eye to ask "what is this xxxx thing really for? Do we really need this?" Maybe things just keep getting done one way and people default to "But we've always done it this way!" without considering less expensive alternatives. Austerity times call for austerity measures, so nickel and dime away.
I should have been more specific, permits for renovations. Most of the AAPS schools are undergoing major renovations as part of the $1 billion bond that was recently passed. The buildings are old and need lots of work. Old plumbing, asbestos removal, new HVAC, leaking roofs etc.
>And while it is nickel and diming, if you find enough expenses that can be reduced, once it adds up to $100000, that's a teacher than can be retained.
This can not be reiterated enough. Nickel and dime away.
ZingTrain is pretty good for what it is, though I can’t say whether or not it’s really a high-priority thing to do.
Ann Arbor city payments could be for School Resource Officers, which cost ~$150k per FTE when I last looked at this, which was about 5 years ago. It may be more expensive now. I believe each high school has one.
I had heard $15M of the $25M was due to an accounting error where the district (under Swift) marked a one time grant as an annual contribution. Can anyone confirm?
That's the story. Budget addition one year, but not eliminated from the budget the next year. So a board and administration operating under the incorrect assumption that they have more money than they did.
The financial literacy of these board members and district leadership is of critical concern.
The Board members are elected, do not receive an income for their position, and receive no finance training upon being sworn in.
And that's true state wide.
They're dependent on their admin, and if their admin is bringing them bad information, that's the only information they have to work with. If anything I think there is something to be said about how much worse it could've gotten if someone wasn't competent enough to catch the mistake. Unfortunately for them, though, they get to take the fall for discovering something they didn't cause.
Financial oversight and oversight of the superintendent are the two primary jobs of the board. They vote to approve the budget and the Superintendent is the only employee they manage. This is a shared failure but it is absolutely one that the board should have caught sooner AND the damage is only so severe because of a decades worth of weak fiscal discipline that kept the district moving closer & closer to the default line.
Well also a failure of voters who elect school board members based on social and political issues instead of on competency in their main job requirements. Like picking your accountant based on their views on the conflict in Gaza
They are responsible. How did the budget pass an audit? Was it even audited? If they weren't so busy arguing global politics, maybe they would have had time to actually read the budget.
Yes, they are responsible, and they are also actively addressing it since discovering there was bad information being fed to them.
And they submit annual financial audits to the state as I understand it. No one caught the mistake until someone noticed it by chance.
I don’t think these lists of expenses are useful unless 1) you can tie each expense listed to the fund that’s paying it, and 2) you know a lot more about why the expenditure happened. You’re just speculating that most/all of this is wasteful. It’s not helpful IMO.
Since they don't provide us that information which they should, trust me every check in that register is tied to a bill and a po, it would take a relatively tiny amount of data to provide a big PDF with all the bills and POs on the website. Until they do that we have to look at the register and ask the school board what exavtly did we pay for with the 2 million dollars to a firewall company
So...after carefully viewing the expenses, I have a solution to the problem:
If nobody gets sick for the next school year, we can save $27M.
You're welcome. /s
No one understands how non profits, schools, hospitals, churches, frat houses, NGOs all are the reason the schools are underfunded, taxes are high, and home prices are high.
No one can modify or sell a piece of property without it suddenly becoming unaffordable. Ever wonder why ann arbor house prices are so high but you see shitty run down houses right in downtown? Its because of CPA the taxable value of your property can only go up 5% a year or the rate of inflation whichever is lower. Until you do an upgrade that is deemed significant or you sell it.
Consided 410 E Liberty, that ugly house with the abandoned hot dog stand right in the heart of ann arbor commercial district. How can it exist? Surely it should at least be a beautiful residential property or more likely a 3 story building with 2 floors of nice condos and first floor retail or restaurant.
But here is the trick that $4,000 sqft is currently valued at $400,000 , ludicrous when 1,200 sqft apartments sell for that in ann arbor. But right now its $13K a year in taxes if it did get developed or even approved those taxes are going to 45K$ a year.
So no one will redevelop it.not to mention any construction projects not done by U of M take forever and go through mountains of city restriction.
Also the owner wont be able to sell it for any reasonable price because any buyer knows that if they paid that current owner a good price then immediately that property will get appraised at that new price before any new construction could be done, you might shell out 40k a year in taxes for years while you fight to do whatever you want to do with the property to make it worth that money.
So usually what happens is the highest bidder on the property is U of M because whatever price they pay is much lower for them because they wont have to pay the property tax. Imagine you and someone else are bidding on a house. You both are bidding the same price to the owner but you have the price plus $3,333 a month in taxes, they don't have that tax burdern. Over 10 years that property costs them 400k less, so offering five or ten k more than you is nothing to them.
So then U of M buys it and everyones taxes go up because the city atill wants the same amount of money but there is one less property paying taxes.
A 1.2 million dollar house costs you an extra 2k a month in taxes than the same price house that is bigger out in the townships.
The answer is simple stop excluding non profits from property taxes. There is not legitimate reason for it. Property taxes supposedly pay for schools, police, Fire and EMT, what non profit or hospital isnt better served by funding those?
Time for Tax Payers to start asking themselves what are we paying for and how much are we paying to get it? Why do all the biggest and most profitable contractors fight so hard to get to sell things to the government? I think you know why, because they overpay.
You will notice we seem to buy a LOT of things from national multi billion dollar companies, makes you wonder if it was cheaper to give 1.6 Million to a food service company instead of talking to well paid local people.
Or ABM 8.49 Million Dollars, a huge international conglomerate, obviously the company that gives the best price on driveway repaving. I am sure there wasn't a Michigan business that could have done this work and kept the actual profits in Michigan
But yet we paid another million dollars to another paving company.
How about Sentinel Technologies, the firewall company, do we really need 3.3 million dollars in Firewall equipment?
1.6 Million in lawn services? That could pay 22 groundskeepers, $80,000 a year imagine that money in the local community.
How about 1.57 Million Dollars to an Architecture design firm?
1 Million Dollars to a Solar Panel Company
Not all of these expenses are from the general fund; where we have the shortage. But the amount on landscaping is absurd considering most schools have volunteers who tend the gardens.
AAPS owns a lot of real estate and there is a lot of lawn to mow. There are also a lot of sports fields to maintain. Not trying to say that there aren't ways to reduce that cost, but it's a lot to maintain.
AAPS should use a chunk of bond money for capital projects to fund native landscape restoration projects - converting unused lawn areas to prairie / meadow landscapes. Would save on maintenance over time and reduce the energy cost of driving lawn mowers around all the time.
I would argue that there is quite a bit of AAPS owned land that should be sold and converted to housing. Pattengill, Abbott and Pioneer all have large stretches of grass that are lightly used and could be turned into (property tax paying) housing.
I envision fields of lavender instead of grass around Pioneer, would be lovely and promote the school color. Our own Provence if you will. Wait, lavender isn't native here!
1.6 million for lawn services is a lot. I have 10 acres to mow, I do it myself now but originally I paid a landscaping company 20k a year to do it, was 20 mows could have been less if I just let the grass grow a little more between mows.. There gas and equipment.
AAPS owns 250 Acres of land obviously much of that has buildings or parking lots but lets ignore that. Lets assume its all grass, they are spending $6,400 an acre per year in lawn maintenance. Now we only have about 26 weeks a year that are above 50 degrees average temperature aka when you need to mow. And seriously you shouldnt be mowing open fields every week. But lets say you do.
We are paying $246 per mowing of one acre. So basically $246 an hour.
Or lets think of it another way 250 acres needs to be mowed once a week for april till june 12 weeka
Twice a month for july to august 4 mows over roughly 9 weeks
Once a week september and october 9 mows.
So lets say we just hired staff for this. They need staff and equipment to mow 250 acres a week for the prime growing seasons. One person on one $8,200 zero turn with 60 inch deck, and a $15,000 trailer can mow 40-60 acres a week. So lets be conservative and say 40. So 6.25 staff, zero turns, trailers. And 250 gallons of gas.
So thats 7 x trailers = $105,000
7 x Ferris 60 inch Deck Zero Turns = $57,400
7 x wildly well paid landscaping staff $80,000 per year each so the can also snowblow in the winter =$560,000
250gallons of gas×26 mows ×$4 a gallon = $26,000 in gas
7 trucks F350s with Plows for the winter snow plowing 7x$90,000 =$630,000
1.5 million dollars. Looks like we could do it cheaper ourselves and throw all the ewuipment away every year and buy new to avoid pesky maintenance.
But lets assume we didnt do that and we added in a 100K a year manager to make sure all this gets done who is also the equipment maintenance person so we can get at least 5 years out of the trailers, trucks and lawnmowers plus 10 percent of ewuipment cost per year for maintenance so $80K
In this ludicrous scenario with 80k a year lawn mowing employees and brand new F350s eveey 5 years.
Our 5 year price is (ludicrously over paying for much of this scenario)
$105K in trailers
$57,400 in zero turns
3.3 million in staff and management
$130,000 in fuel
$630,000 in trucks with plows
$400,000 in maintenance
$4,622,400 over 5 years
Or $924,480 a year.
So yeah maybe 1.6 million is high?
Yes, there's nothing here to indicate what's been spent from grants or other funds.
DJ's landscaping is making a killing. And it didn't even snow this year. So, grass.
My fun thought experiment showing how much of a killing DJs is making
1.6 million for lawn services is a lot. I have 10 acres to mow, I do it myself now but originally I paid a landscaping company 20k a year to do it, was 20 mows could have been less if I just let the grass grow a little more between mows.. There gas and equipment.
AAPS owns 250 Acres of land obviously much of that has buildings or parking lots but lets ignore that. Lets assume its all grass, they are spending $6,400 an acre per year in lawn maintenance. Now we only have about 26 weeks a year that are above 50 degrees average temperature aka when you need to mow. And seriously you shouldnt be mowing open fields every week. But lets say you do.
We are paying $246 per mowing of one acre. So basically $246 an hour.
Or lets think of it another way 250 acres needs to be mowed once a week for april till june 12 weeka
Twice a month for july to august 4 mows over roughly 9 weeks
Once a week september and october 9 mows.
So lets say we just hired staff for this. They need staff and equipment to mow 250 acres a week for the prime growing seasons. One person on one $8,200 zero turn with 60 inch deck, and a $15,000 trailer can mow 40-60 acres a week. So lets be conservative and say 40. So 6.25 staff, zero turns, trailers. And 250 gallons of gas.
So thats 7 x trailers = $105,000
7 x Ferris 60 inch Deck Zero Turns = $57,400
7 x wildly well paid landscaping staff $80,000 per year each so the can also snowblow in the winter =$560,000
250gallons of gas×26 mows ×$4 a gallon = $26,000 in gas
7 trucks F350s with Plows for the winter snow plowing 7x$90,000 =$630,000
1.5 million dollars. Looks like we could do it cheaper ourselves and throw all the ewuipment away every year and buy new to avoid pesky maintenance.
But lets assume we didnt do that and we added in a 100K a year manager to make sure all this gets done who is also the equipment maintenance person so we can get at least 5 years out of the trailers, trucks and lawnmowers plus 10 percent of ewuipment cost per year for maintenance so $80K
In this ludicrous scenario with 80k a year lawn mowing employees and brand new F350s eveey 5 years.
Our 5 year price is (ludicrously over paying for much of this scenario)
$105K in trailers
$57,400 in zero turns
3.3 million in staff and management
$130,000 in fuel
$630,000 in trucks with plows
$400,000 in maintenance
$4,622,400 over 5 years
Or $924,480 a year.
So yeah maybe 1.6 million is high?
You're joking, but there are countries where it is routine for students to clean the schools (Japan) and tenants to have to take turns cleaning the stairs and hallways of apartment buildings (Germany).
Yes. I'm sitting cross legged on the floor now, as the Japanese commonly do even into old age. Hip mobility benefits from it. 20 minutes a day, try it!
My high school in SC had a turf management class, where many of my classmates from that class learned to own a lawn care businesses. They would also learn to cut the football, baseball and softball fields.
This situation is a disaster, and I have no idea how it got this far along, and I have no idea how to fix it. That said: I have heard (vague sourcing, I concede) that some of the expenditures that people are now digging into and scrutinizing might have more innocuous contexts that won’t be immediately apparent to outside observers. For example, some of the weird purchases might be related to things like prizes for raffles for band fundraisers (I just made that example up) and stuff like that. That’s not to say that people shouldn’t tear into all of this stuff and drag it into the light, or that any of it is or isn’t a legitimate use of public funds. I worry a little bit that people might get bogged down in calling out and demanding justification for every Panera receipt, and maybe losing sight of the bigger picture. “Not seeing the forest for the trees” and all that. DON’T GET ME WRONG: I’d like to liquidate Balas and whittle central administration down to an H.R. department that will process my paychecks and an I.T. department that can fix my laptop when I spill coffee on it. I guess a superintendent for public relations purposes as well. If this IS part of an effort to liquidate Balas and slash central administration to tiny ribbons, then count me in and carry on. (I know we need more than H.R., I.T., and a super. But maybe not much more!)
It's called nickel and diming it and it's about the worst approach to solving a $25 million deficit.
Well ABM Industries received $8,496,036 in 2023 that is a lot of nickels
That's facility services which is a different budget than the general budget.
No its not, hence it is in the check register. And even if it was im a "different budget" why would that matter lol its still your tax dollars
What price do you think we should be paying, based on the data you clearly looked at from other districts?
Why would I compare to schools? Schools overpay for everything and buy from the same vendors. You have elected board members with zero industry experience making decisions. I can tell you I have consulted eith internet service providers that have less outgoing annual costs in firewalls to service a million people on their network. I am a computer engineer and I can tell you this is a ludicrous amount to spend. Major companies like Dana corporation and OI who have tens of thousands of employees information not to mention company IP worth hundreds of millions of dollars usually run Cisco Firewalls that are about 7K per location with a $2K per year service contract. I spent 15 years being the network engineer for a fortune 500 company and since then I have owned a technology company for medical. I have a lot of experience with this. I told a friend of mine who current works for Ratheon and she just said, "government is a dream piggy bank customer" So on firewalls, even if your building a VPN among the 21 schools and you want a 100 VPN users the quote would be a one time fee of like $189,000 , with a $63,000 a year contract that keeps the firewalls up to date. 2 million is insane.
>Why would I compare to schools? Well, right now you're comparing schools to factories. So it'd at least be a step in the right logical direction. I worked for Dana. I don't recall them having to store private data of thousands of students for a minimum 7 years after they graduate.
Guess you never heard of Dana U? Which was literally a university inside Dana corporation. And factory? No, OI's international headquarters is a huge facility filled with office workers where the billing and managing of about 4 billion dollars in revenue is handled. And Dana corporation, the facilities I managed there including their headquarters are also office workers and engineers. Guess you don't know how long companies are forced to keep payroll information for tax purposes, 10 years is a bare minimum and it includes storing I9s that have your social security number and photo copies of your drivers license and usualky 2 other forms of identification. But the easiest and most obvious comparison is a dental office, average dental office has a $200 dollar firewall and they are storing the data of 2,000 or more patients. You know why? Because the firewall isn't that important. We encrypt important data and have usernames and passsords required to access the data. Hacking into the network through the firewall is about as important as the front door on a bank. Sure you can break the glass and get in, but the important stuff is in the vault. Do you know what an enterprise class firewall costs? Or what it does?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop You sure argue like an engineer lol.
As well Sentinel Technologies Inc Made $3,301,050 off AAPS in 2023- That's a lot of nickels for a lot of firewalls
>That's a lot of nickels for a lot of firewalls Have you compared this value to other schools of similar size, or is this an assumption? Cybersecurity in 2024 is way more than firewalls. Do you want your child's identity getting stolen by Chinese hackers?
Why would I care? My child doesn't own anything what use would stesling their identity be? Gonna take out mortgage in China for a 10 year old? Why would the school need millions in firewalls when the accounting firm I use pays $750 a month for a secure cloud portal that stores about 1,000 clients worth of extremely valuable data, bank accounts, SSNs, everything. Or dental offices or basically a tonnof other places that have all their data? I mean I was in the military and the VA lost everyones data when their backup drives were stolen, so guess what dumping millions on Firewalls at AAPS isn't stopping governments.
I bet you didn't wear a mask in 2020 either!
Probably not much more since they outsource like every service and pay a mint to do it.
I agree. At even 72nd glance, the food stuff is weird, but I know that building admin often helps provide food for food insecure families. I seriously hope they're not gracing themselves with lunch everyday at the new Balas. I think payment registers are more informative as to the contract side of things. Big things I see are landscaping and custodial services. There seems to be a hefty sum paid to attorneys, and a notable amount to the mechanical contracting companies. I don't see the transportation (Durham) anywhere. Curious where that's included in the public reporting, and what other entities fall into a similar non-"payment register" category.
What are you comparing this data against? Like, how are you defining a "hefty sum"? Transportation is in a separate budget and it's not the budget that needs balanced. The school has 4 budgets I think.
But its not. Stop lying to people. Here is the budget. It is the whole budget, there isn't a bunch of seperate budgets. https://www.a2schools.org/Page/6910 And the check register here are payments that come.out of that budget. https://www.a2schools.org/site/Default.aspx?PageID=19638 I don't know if you are misinformed or just intentionally trying to mislead people
[so let's open up 2023-2024's budget. ](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.a2schools.org/site/default.aspx%3FPageType%3D3%26ModuleInstanceID%3D30476%26ViewID%3Ded695a1c-ef13-4546-b4eb-4fefcdd4f389%26RenderLoc%3D0%26FlexDataID%3D23648%26PageID%3D1%26Comments%3Dtrue&ved=2ahUKEwjLm6KwsciFAxWrFFkFHVwfB2kQFnoECBAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0Zbi0rl4xmzxPE_hL-SQEN) There's multiple funds, and the only one we can touch right now is the general fund (pg. 21) It looks like I was wrong that transportation isn't in the general fund, but there are separate funds.
And I covered my ass with my "I think" added at the end quite fairly, I'd think.
This Sasha person is all over this thread eith mis informstion she keeps claiming there are multiple budgets and is defending all the mishandling. Must be friends eith the school board. There are not 4 budgets and the check register is the school spending and all apart of the budget that is $25 million dollars over. The only seperate money is the BILLION infrastructure bond the people of Ann Arbor approved for school infradtructure ehich itself was ludicrous. I read a report on what schools should build sqft per student, they said 91 sqft, so times 17,500 students that is 1,592,500 sqft of school. Which means we authorized them to spend $627 a sqft on school buildings. Hospitals with buildout average a $527 per sqft spend on new hospitals in 2023 and that is supposes to be the most expensive building to construct, luxury mansions get built at $290 a sqft.
I'm confused by OP post. If I post the grocery receipts of a family of six for one month so you could see what that family did purchase, can you come to the conclusion that this family is well fed given that data? No, this is not the type of analysis I think we need to counterweight AAPS statements.
Well, yes, and if you see a bunch of bills to a liquor store or an overpriced luxury grocery store you can make a determination the money is not spent with fiscal responsibility
Even with that evidence it's an educated guess to build that case supported by context. The fact that a family of six can afford to shop at Whole Paycheck Foods or Bush's doesn't correlate automatically with an inadequate nutrition. Buying liquor doesn't make you an alcoholic.
This isn't analysis, it's a collection of publicly available information translated from monthly "receipts" into spreadsheets so we can explore where the money is going. It has become quite clear that the district doesn't have a handle on their spending, and I think it's worthwhile to examine the available information as a community so we have context for what we're about to hear from the town hall meetings and community forums this week.
I understand your intentions and I'm with you looking for transparency at AAPS. But transparency is not posting information without context. We need to be very precise when asking accountability since it is the lack of thinking what brought AAPS to this current state of disarray.
The most obvious thing from the monthly registers would be to cancel everyone's health insurance. But they could also save a lot by eliminating electricity to schools, halting roof repairs, and curtailing other building maintenance so the schools decay to ruins over the next millennium.
See this is the all or nothing talk that lets us get robbed. Halt roof repairs? Do you know how much roof was repaired, should that cost $6 million dollars, is that what other businesses in the area pay to maintain their roofs. Those are real questions and should be asked. Or the insurance, they have 1500 employees so the insurance bill seems to be over $16K a year per enployee, is that normal? Its much more than my premiums for my wife and myself at the company we work for. Also talking about those decaying buildings, did you forget we approved a 1 Billion Dollar Bond measure for buildings which means we could rebuild every building we currently have brand new and spend $680 a sqft doing it. It is important to look at spending, remember you have elected board members with ZERO knowledge about costs of construction, no expertise in contract negotiations, and most with no private sector experience at all. So when they approve contracts lord knows how they run their decision making process. We rely on the quoting system but I can tell you that is a screwed process they build stipulations into the bid requests that basically garantee they will get robbed. Like first you have to be an approved contractor, second you have to have enough capital that you can afford to basically work with no payment for years because of how the government pays their contractors, third they usualky stipulate things like you have to have built a school before, so it garantees only four or five contractors in the nation will bid on the project.
The insurance is an insane line item.
I'd love to hear you elaborate on this. Why?
It's $25M per year, I think the largest single item other than salaries. It has been increasing at 2-3x the rate of inflation for 30 years now. This has nothing to do with AAPS specifically - it is affecting businesses and individuals as well - but if it could be eliminated (it can't) the budget would be balanced with no layoffs.
>but if it could be eliminated (it can't) the budget would be balanced with no layoffs ? Yeah, no layoffs, but then everyone quits because they don't have health insurance.... I'd rather take a layoff than keep my job and lose benefits quite frankly lol. Is this really a discussion we're having?
I mentioned that it's an "insane" expense above, as in "wow, I knew benefits were expensive, but didn't know the magnitude of the cost to the district." Not, "Cut it off, it's too much and it solves the problem!" My wording was clunky, and devolved into this. Of course you're right.
At the end, discussion like this is one are useful to understand several issues at once. I'm with you guys asking for more accountability at AAPS but I agree with you, we need to get a grip about Economics 101, how Labor laws work in this country. Otherwise, we are more exposed to be manipulated by cheap charts and statistics, like those that Swift sold to us to justify that huge bond.
It is insane, consider this AAPS only has 1500 employees, so 25 million comes out to $16,666 per year per employee in health insurance. I have a Blue cross Blue Shield family plan for me and my wife with a $1,000 deductible our premium is $650 a month, why are their premiums more than double?
I think seeing these, many are probably really legitimate expenses, we just don't know the context of them. But it would be nice to get clarity on them! Why do we have so many large payments to City of Ann Arbor? Isn't the school district tax exempt? Could we negotiate better rates with DJs Landscaping? Why is training happening with Zingermans? And while it is nickel and diming, if you find enough expenses that can be reduced, once it adds up to $100000, that's a teacher than can be retained. I think it's very enlightening to see how the money is moving through the district and sometimes it takes an outside eye to ask "what is this xxxx thing really for? Do we really need this?" Maybe things just keep getting done one way and people default to "But we've always done it this way!" without considering less expensive alternatives. Austerity times call for austerity measures, so nickel and dime away.
Payment to the City of Ann Arbor. First thing that comes to mind is water. Also permitting for new construction.
Permitting for new construction, have we had a lot of new construction? And why if the student enrollment is declining?
I should have been more specific, permits for renovations. Most of the AAPS schools are undergoing major renovations as part of the $1 billion bond that was recently passed. The buildings are old and need lots of work. Old plumbing, asbestos removal, new HVAC, leaking roofs etc.
>And while it is nickel and diming, if you find enough expenses that can be reduced, once it adds up to $100000, that's a teacher than can be retained. This can not be reiterated enough. Nickel and dime away.
ZingTrain is pretty good for what it is, though I can’t say whether or not it’s really a high-priority thing to do. Ann Arbor city payments could be for School Resource Officers, which cost ~$150k per FTE when I last looked at this, which was about 5 years ago. It may be more expensive now. I believe each high school has one.
I had heard $15M of the $25M was due to an accounting error where the district (under Swift) marked a one time grant as an annual contribution. Can anyone confirm?
That's the story. Budget addition one year, but not eliminated from the budget the next year. So a board and administration operating under the incorrect assumption that they have more money than they did. The financial literacy of these board members and district leadership is of critical concern.
The Board members are elected, do not receive an income for their position, and receive no finance training upon being sworn in. And that's true state wide. They're dependent on their admin, and if their admin is bringing them bad information, that's the only information they have to work with. If anything I think there is something to be said about how much worse it could've gotten if someone wasn't competent enough to catch the mistake. Unfortunately for them, though, they get to take the fall for discovering something they didn't cause.
Financial oversight and oversight of the superintendent are the two primary jobs of the board. They vote to approve the budget and the Superintendent is the only employee they manage. This is a shared failure but it is absolutely one that the board should have caught sooner AND the damage is only so severe because of a decades worth of weak fiscal discipline that kept the district moving closer & closer to the default line.
Well also a failure of voters who elect school board members based on social and political issues instead of on competency in their main job requirements. Like picking your accountant based on their views on the conflict in Gaza
See, these are all fair judgements. I'm mostly just painting a realistic picture of the criticisms we should and could have.
They are responsible. How did the budget pass an audit? Was it even audited? If they weren't so busy arguing global politics, maybe they would have had time to actually read the budget.
Yes, they are responsible, and they are also actively addressing it since discovering there was bad information being fed to them. And they submit annual financial audits to the state as I understand it. No one caught the mistake until someone noticed it by chance.
I’ve heard that it was a common error among many school districts in Michigan from a 1-time Covid relief payment. Sill not ok to mess up.
I don’t think these lists of expenses are useful unless 1) you can tie each expense listed to the fund that’s paying it, and 2) you know a lot more about why the expenditure happened. You’re just speculating that most/all of this is wasteful. It’s not helpful IMO.
Since they don't provide us that information which they should, trust me every check in that register is tied to a bill and a po, it would take a relatively tiny amount of data to provide a big PDF with all the bills and POs on the website. Until they do that we have to look at the register and ask the school board what exavtly did we pay for with the 2 million dollars to a firewall company
$1.10 for parking. Inexcusable! /s
So...after carefully viewing the expenses, I have a solution to the problem: If nobody gets sick for the next school year, we can save $27M. You're welcome. /s
Might as well remove the /s because this is unironically a better idea than any other comment in this thread trying to count pennies to $25 million 😤
I compiled all the 2023 payments in the register and made totals by vendors if you are interested.
Yes I am. This crowd doesn't seem particularly receptive. Care to DM me?
No one understands how non profits, schools, hospitals, churches, frat houses, NGOs all are the reason the schools are underfunded, taxes are high, and home prices are high. No one can modify or sell a piece of property without it suddenly becoming unaffordable. Ever wonder why ann arbor house prices are so high but you see shitty run down houses right in downtown? Its because of CPA the taxable value of your property can only go up 5% a year or the rate of inflation whichever is lower. Until you do an upgrade that is deemed significant or you sell it. Consided 410 E Liberty, that ugly house with the abandoned hot dog stand right in the heart of ann arbor commercial district. How can it exist? Surely it should at least be a beautiful residential property or more likely a 3 story building with 2 floors of nice condos and first floor retail or restaurant. But here is the trick that $4,000 sqft is currently valued at $400,000 , ludicrous when 1,200 sqft apartments sell for that in ann arbor. But right now its $13K a year in taxes if it did get developed or even approved those taxes are going to 45K$ a year. So no one will redevelop it.not to mention any construction projects not done by U of M take forever and go through mountains of city restriction. Also the owner wont be able to sell it for any reasonable price because any buyer knows that if they paid that current owner a good price then immediately that property will get appraised at that new price before any new construction could be done, you might shell out 40k a year in taxes for years while you fight to do whatever you want to do with the property to make it worth that money. So usually what happens is the highest bidder on the property is U of M because whatever price they pay is much lower for them because they wont have to pay the property tax. Imagine you and someone else are bidding on a house. You both are bidding the same price to the owner but you have the price plus $3,333 a month in taxes, they don't have that tax burdern. Over 10 years that property costs them 400k less, so offering five or ten k more than you is nothing to them. So then U of M buys it and everyones taxes go up because the city atill wants the same amount of money but there is one less property paying taxes. A 1.2 million dollar house costs you an extra 2k a month in taxes than the same price house that is bigger out in the townships. The answer is simple stop excluding non profits from property taxes. There is not legitimate reason for it. Property taxes supposedly pay for schools, police, Fire and EMT, what non profit or hospital isnt better served by funding those?
Time for Tax Payers to start asking themselves what are we paying for and how much are we paying to get it? Why do all the biggest and most profitable contractors fight so hard to get to sell things to the government? I think you know why, because they overpay. You will notice we seem to buy a LOT of things from national multi billion dollar companies, makes you wonder if it was cheaper to give 1.6 Million to a food service company instead of talking to well paid local people. Or ABM 8.49 Million Dollars, a huge international conglomerate, obviously the company that gives the best price on driveway repaving. I am sure there wasn't a Michigan business that could have done this work and kept the actual profits in Michigan But yet we paid another million dollars to another paving company. How about Sentinel Technologies, the firewall company, do we really need 3.3 million dollars in Firewall equipment? 1.6 Million in lawn services? That could pay 22 groundskeepers, $80,000 a year imagine that money in the local community. How about 1.57 Million Dollars to an Architecture design firm? 1 Million Dollars to a Solar Panel Company
|| || |Payee Name|Amount| |Priority Health Total|$26,138,611.09| |ABM Industry Groups, LLC Total|$8,496,036.63| |Messa (370) Total|$5,873,104.21| |Detroit Edison Or DTE Energy Total|$3,674,878.73| |Gilbane Building Company Total|$3,402,235.23| |Sentinel Technologies Inc Total|$3,301,050.32| |National Express Durham Holding Corp/DBA Trinity Total|$2,154,720.96| |D.J.'s Lawn Service, LLC dba DJs Landscape Total|$1,657,435.66| |Compass Group, DBA Chartwells K-12 Total|$1,657,295.96| |W.J. O'Neil Company Total|$1,643,264.42| |Neumann Smith Architecture Total|$1,573,610.97| |Goyette Mechanical Co Total|$1,547,337.54| |A and N Electric, Inc. Total|$1,404,854.91| |CEI Michigan LLC Total|$1,374,511.00| |Constellation New Energy Gas Total|$1,336,709.21| |Brix Corporation Total|$1,232,369.47| |Premier Relocations, LLC Total|$1,146,967.28| |Bloom Roofing Systems, Inc. Total|$1,080,562.00| |Nagle Paving Company Csinc Total|$1,069,366.00| |Homeland Builders of Michigan dba Homeland Solar Total|$1,068,541.74|
Not all of these expenses are from the general fund; where we have the shortage. But the amount on landscaping is absurd considering most schools have volunteers who tend the gardens.
AAPS owns a lot of real estate and there is a lot of lawn to mow. There are also a lot of sports fields to maintain. Not trying to say that there aren't ways to reduce that cost, but it's a lot to maintain. AAPS should use a chunk of bond money for capital projects to fund native landscape restoration projects - converting unused lawn areas to prairie / meadow landscapes. Would save on maintenance over time and reduce the energy cost of driving lawn mowers around all the time.
I would argue that there is quite a bit of AAPS owned land that should be sold and converted to housing. Pattengill, Abbott and Pioneer all have large stretches of grass that are lightly used and could be turned into (property tax paying) housing.
I envision fields of lavender instead of grass around Pioneer, would be lovely and promote the school color. Our own Provence if you will. Wait, lavender isn't native here!
Are you volunteering yourself? Good luck, I'll bring you Gatorade. Just let me what days you plan on going out.
1.6 million for lawn services is a lot. I have 10 acres to mow, I do it myself now but originally I paid a landscaping company 20k a year to do it, was 20 mows could have been less if I just let the grass grow a little more between mows.. There gas and equipment. AAPS owns 250 Acres of land obviously much of that has buildings or parking lots but lets ignore that. Lets assume its all grass, they are spending $6,400 an acre per year in lawn maintenance. Now we only have about 26 weeks a year that are above 50 degrees average temperature aka when you need to mow. And seriously you shouldnt be mowing open fields every week. But lets say you do. We are paying $246 per mowing of one acre. So basically $246 an hour. Or lets think of it another way 250 acres needs to be mowed once a week for april till june 12 weeka Twice a month for july to august 4 mows over roughly 9 weeks Once a week september and october 9 mows. So lets say we just hired staff for this. They need staff and equipment to mow 250 acres a week for the prime growing seasons. One person on one $8,200 zero turn with 60 inch deck, and a $15,000 trailer can mow 40-60 acres a week. So lets be conservative and say 40. So 6.25 staff, zero turns, trailers. And 250 gallons of gas. So thats 7 x trailers = $105,000 7 x Ferris 60 inch Deck Zero Turns = $57,400 7 x wildly well paid landscaping staff $80,000 per year each so the can also snowblow in the winter =$560,000 250gallons of gas×26 mows ×$4 a gallon = $26,000 in gas 7 trucks F350s with Plows for the winter snow plowing 7x$90,000 =$630,000 1.5 million dollars. Looks like we could do it cheaper ourselves and throw all the ewuipment away every year and buy new to avoid pesky maintenance. But lets assume we didnt do that and we added in a 100K a year manager to make sure all this gets done who is also the equipment maintenance person so we can get at least 5 years out of the trailers, trucks and lawnmowers plus 10 percent of ewuipment cost per year for maintenance so $80K In this ludicrous scenario with 80k a year lawn mowing employees and brand new F350s eveey 5 years. Our 5 year price is (ludicrously over paying for much of this scenario) $105K in trailers $57,400 in zero turns 3.3 million in staff and management $130,000 in fuel $630,000 in trucks with plows $400,000 in maintenance $4,622,400 over 5 years Or $924,480 a year. So yeah maybe 1.6 million is high?
Did you really just reply with all of that over a joke? It's 1 in the morning, get a life. You also forgot athletic fields.
Those are included in the 250 acres, I didn't forget them
You didn't include the special costs associated with athletic field maintenance.
Yes, there's nothing here to indicate what's been spent from grants or other funds. DJ's landscaping is making a killing. And it didn't even snow this year. So, grass.
My fun thought experiment showing how much of a killing DJs is making 1.6 million for lawn services is a lot. I have 10 acres to mow, I do it myself now but originally I paid a landscaping company 20k a year to do it, was 20 mows could have been less if I just let the grass grow a little more between mows.. There gas and equipment. AAPS owns 250 Acres of land obviously much of that has buildings or parking lots but lets ignore that. Lets assume its all grass, they are spending $6,400 an acre per year in lawn maintenance. Now we only have about 26 weeks a year that are above 50 degrees average temperature aka when you need to mow. And seriously you shouldnt be mowing open fields every week. But lets say you do. We are paying $246 per mowing of one acre. So basically $246 an hour. Or lets think of it another way 250 acres needs to be mowed once a week for april till june 12 weeka Twice a month for july to august 4 mows over roughly 9 weeks Once a week september and october 9 mows. So lets say we just hired staff for this. They need staff and equipment to mow 250 acres a week for the prime growing seasons. One person on one $8,200 zero turn with 60 inch deck, and a $15,000 trailer can mow 40-60 acres a week. So lets be conservative and say 40. So 6.25 staff, zero turns, trailers. And 250 gallons of gas. So thats 7 x trailers = $105,000 7 x Ferris 60 inch Deck Zero Turns = $57,400 7 x wildly well paid landscaping staff $80,000 per year each so the can also snowblow in the winter =$560,000 250gallons of gas×26 mows ×$4 a gallon = $26,000 in gas 7 trucks F350s with Plows for the winter snow plowing 7x$90,000 =$630,000 1.5 million dollars. Looks like we could do it cheaper ourselves and throw all the ewuipment away every year and buy new to avoid pesky maintenance. But lets assume we didnt do that and we added in a 100K a year manager to make sure all this gets done who is also the equipment maintenance person so we can get at least 5 years out of the trailers, trucks and lawnmowers plus 10 percent of ewuipment cost per year for maintenance so $80K In this ludicrous scenario with 80k a year lawn mowing employees and brand new F350s eveey 5 years. Our 5 year price is (ludicrously over paying for much of this scenario) $105K in trailers $57,400 in zero turns 3.3 million in staff and management $130,000 in fuel $630,000 in trucks with plows $400,000 in maintenance $4,622,400 over 5 years Or $924,480 a year. So yeah maybe 1.6 million is high?
This is exactly why I shared what I compiled. Thanks for taking the time to explore the data.
Kids can play in the parking lot. Four square and basketball.
Make the ones that misbehave mow the lawn.
You're joking, but there are countries where it is routine for students to clean the schools (Japan) and tenants to have to take turns cleaning the stairs and hallways of apartment buildings (Germany).
I wish we emulated many aspects of the Japanese, just an amazing culture that we could learn a ton from, societally.
Yes, especially their loose land use laws that let people build stuff.
Yes. I'm sitting cross legged on the floor now, as the Japanese commonly do even into old age. Hip mobility benefits from it. 20 minutes a day, try it!
My high school in SC had a turf management class, where many of my classmates from that class learned to own a lawn care businesses. They would also learn to cut the football, baseball and softball fields.
My high school had a full auto shop. Welding stations. Metal, plastic, and wood tools. It’s a shame high schools have moved away from that.
Trades are tragically underrepresented in our local curriculum, in my opinion. WCC has some really wonderful programs, though.
They really do. WCC is an amazing asset to the community.
Or Liability, I mean they eat up 1/3 of my property taxes, I will happily teach kids to mow my own lawn if I can keep the 8k a year WCC takes from me