Some North Texas voters successfully rejected several hefty school bond propositions in Saturday’s municipal elections.
Granbury ISD’s $161 million bond failed by roughly 400 votes, with 52% voting against it, according to Hood County’s posted election results.
The bond gained a good amount of attention after Steve Biggers, Hood County Republican Party chair, organized a “No Bond Bus Tour” campaign, leading to his arrest, as covered by The Dallas Express.
Biggers, who used a decommissioned school bus to campaign against the bond, was arrested on April 19 for allegedly “tampering with a government record.”
The Hood County Sheriff’s Office claimed he entered “false information into a government record to obtain a temporary registration [for the bus] from the Hood County Registration/Tax Assessor’s Office,” per a press release from the sheriff’s office.
The school district’s previous bond election in November failed by two votes, The Dallas Express reported.
Similarly, Big Springs ISD community members campaigned against their district’s two bond propositions that totaled $219 million, per Texas Scorecard. Opponents of the bond borrowed Granbury ISD’s bond opponents’ slogan, “If you know, you NO,” to persuade voters to vote against the bond.
Both propositions were defeated by a two-thirds majority of voters who cast ballots in the election.
In contrast, voters in Cedar Hill ISD, located in Dallas County, passed a bond for the first time in 12 years. Unofficial results show that the district’s $282.4 million bond was approved by “a nearly 2-to-1 margin,” per Cedar Hill ISD.
Several other proposed school bonds were passed by Texas voters, including four propositions in the Georgetown ISD totaling $649 million. Voters in Mansfield ISD passed two of the five proposals in the district’s $777 million bond package: Proposition A passed for $584.5 million, and Proposition B passed for $4 million.
Nearly 250 bonds totaling $15.5 billion were on the ballot across the state, according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
School districts in the Lone Star state currently have an outstanding debt of nearly $120 billion in voter-approved debt backed by property taxes, per the Texas Bond Review Board.
