Mark Clement has been on the Alpine School Board for 10 years. But the minutes of the school board meetings are only available for the last 6 years. I went through those 6 years of school board meeting minutes looking for every vote where the school board voted to raise our taxes, and I put all those votes into this chart:
As you can see from this chart, over the last 6 years, the school board voted 10 times to raise our taxes and, not surprisingly, Mark voted YES all 10 times. And 5 of those times he was so eager to raise our taxes that he was the board member who made the motion to do so. In other words, Mark has a 100% voting record of RAISING OUR TAXES every chance he got over the last 6 years.
Recently, Mark has begun saying that he would like to see the school board save up and pay for new school buildings and renovations with cash instead of paying for them with debt (bonds) because he says 40% of the bond money goes toward interest.
But Mark has been on the school board for 10 years - if he was anti-debt (anti-bonds), why did he vote to issue new debt (bonds) every chance he got? In just the last 6 years alone, he voted 5 times to issue new debt (new bonds), thus voting to saddle all of us, his neighbors, with higher property taxes year after year to make principal and interest payments on all that debt.
This new-found position that Mark is taking sounds a lot like a career politician promising to do the exact opposite of what he's always done because he's trying to win re-election (he is seeking a 4th term after all). The best predictor of a politician's future votes is that politician's past votes, and Mark's past votes are 100% on the side of raising our taxes and burying us in debt. I don't buy Mark's recent conversion to being anti-debt and anti-waste, and you shouldn't either.
The constant tax increases by the school board are what drove me to run for school board, and priority number one for me is to stop Alpine School Board from raising our taxes. The main reason I decided to run against Mark Clement was to give my neighbors a clear choice between a board member who will almost definitely continue voting to raise their taxes (Mark), and one who definitely won't (me).
MY PROMISE - If elected, I will never vote to raise our property taxes, either with new debt (bonds) or with an increased tax rate. I also commit to avoiding and exposing accounting gimmicks that the board has used in the past to try to sell voters on tax increases, which might sound good, but still result in higher taxes for me and my neighbors. No more tax increases. Period.
The base allocation the school board has to work with, at current tax rates, is over a Billion dollars per year. The school board can do a great job educating students with that Billion dollars if the money is not wasted, so the constant tax increases are unnecessary and have got to stop.
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