Sacramento, CA -- Come November, Californians will likely be asked to approve billions of dollars in state and local bonds to finance the construction of school facilities. No one denies the need for more schools and classrooms, especially in the face of a burgeoning student population. The problem is whether taxpayers are getting the most out of the dollars spent on school construction. As things stand now, they aren’t.

A maze of state regulations currently burdens school construction, so much so that the state’s Little Hoover Commission charges that the regulations "micro-manage school construction projects, delaying the completion of and driving up the costs of school facilities." At the heart of the problem is the Field Act, the state’s stringent school-construction law.

The Act gives the state the authority to determine structural safety standards, review plans, and oversee the construction process for all public school buildings. The Act effectively prohibits public schoolsunder current commercial building codes, new commercial buildings are as safe or safer than many schools built under the Field Act.

The problem, then, is not a question of safety, but rather the state’s requirement, through the Field Act and the State Lease Purchase Program, that school districts get the approval of a Byzantine array of state agencies for any school construction. The from using vacant commercial buildings, even though approval process requires 64 separate steps and 84 different documents and involves the Division of State Architect, the California Department of Education, the state Office of Public School Construction (OPSC), and the State Allocation Board. These bureaucratic approvals delay new school construction by six months to two years. Further, school districts must also pay substantial fees for the agencies’ review. As the Little Hoover Commission observes, “Often lost in the process, amid mounds of paperwork and huge bureaucratic costs, is the concept that school facilities should be constructed efficiently and economically.”

Not only is the approval process crafted to be slow and cumbersome, bureaucratic incompetence is rife. According to a State Senate report: “Furthermore, [school district] participants in the State program cannot easily determine the current status of their projects. School districts complain of lost paperwork and of misinformation from OPSC staff. Thus, almost all school districts hire consultants to navigate through the paperwork and to push projects forward.”

The bureaucratic process is also unfair. The State Senate report notes: “Such a complex system not only produces added costs in terms of staff hours, frustration, and delay, but it also creates an uneven playing field. Large school districts that build frequently, and those with sufficient resources to hire specialized staff and consultants have a great advantage in advancing their projects.”

Finally, the state’s prevailing wage law artificially increases the wage rates on government works contracts, including contracts for school construction. The imposition of these artificially high wage rates unnecessarily inflates government project costs by as much as 40 percent, according to some studies. Until state leaders are willing to get serious about reducing the costs of school construction, taxpayers should be wary of ponying up serious money for school facilities.

-- Lance T. Izumi