Minooka High School OKs $52 million in bonds for field house, career center

The Minooka Community High School Board will move ahead with the sale of $52 million in working cash bonds to help pay for the construction of a new Career and Technical Education Center and field house.

The building will cost $82 million in total, with approximately $30 million of the funding coming out of the district’s savings.

Anne Noble with Stifel Institutional told the board on Jan. 29 that the bond sale went exceptionally well, and they were able to sell the bonds at 3.3% interest rate.

“We originally estimated, conservatively, an interest rate of 5%,” Noble said. “The final interest rate came in at 3.37%, quite a notable difference, which allowed us to shave three years off the payback period.”

Noble said the district also had more growth in its equalized assessed value, the metric by which property taxes are decided, that wasn’t projected. This gave the district a cushion in the model for paying back the bonds, and saved it some money over time. The total debt service, Noble said, will be $66.8 million when the bonds are paid off.

The bonds aren’t expected to effect Minooka’s tax rate, either. Noble said the projections for the district’s pay back were made without any expectation of growth in the district’s EAV, and Superintendent Robert Schiffbauer said in a Morris Herald-News story back in October that the project won’t have any effect on taxpayers.

Schiffbauer said Tuesday that the district is very happy with how it turned out.

“There was over $275 million million worth of interest in those $50 million bonds,” he said. “What that does is allows the brokers to drive that interest rate down and all the way to 3.37% is a huge win for the district and really, for the taxpayers. Over the life of those bonds, it’ll save the taxpayers $16.6 million.”

Schiffbauer said the bonds will be paid back by Dec. 1, 2034 now instead of Dec. 1, 2037, which was the original plan.

He also said there’s a call date of 2032, which is the date when the district is allowed to pay the bond off in full. If the district can pay it off by then, it’ll save even more money.

The new project includes the Career and Technical Education Center, which will add an auto shop, welding shop, construction and woods shop and a robotics electricity lab.

The project also will add a commercial kitchen, and will remodel the food lab. The Career and Technical Education Center will be built at the Central Campus at 301 Wabena Ave. in Minooka.

The field house, which will be built at the South Campus at 26655 Eames St., will be the home to a 200-meter, six lane indoor track, a weight room, additional locker rooms, a coaches office, more storage and a maintenance shop.