City Council Minutes 1986 10 07 - Laserfiche WebLink

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City of Louisville is residential growth dependent and the sales tax re- venues generated by commercial enterprises are desperately needed to re- lieve that dependency and to reduce other increases. In other words, this Council really doesn't have a whole lot of choice but to encourage growth. We have been working on trying to find ways to reduce that growth de- pendency." "I think its important for us to realize that the impact of these petitions are that taxes, especially property taxes, would be greatly increase if we had to reduce (revenues the City receives from the building permits associated with growth)." Referencing the section regarding classroom size, Sackett stated that if the authority of allowing residential growth is delegated to the school dis- trict, authority is then delegated to an electorate other than the City of Louisville. The City would loose the ability to plan its own destination. Sackett stated that in asking the names of the members of the group, he felt the citizens of Louisville need to know that the names he mentioned before were people who lost in the last election. "I think its important for the people in Louisville to know that they resent the fact that they lost. I feel like thats one of the reasons that they are bringing the petition." "The reason for petition is that it helps the City avoid the tyranny of a Council. If a Council takes an action that the majority of the City doesn't like, they have the right to petition and I think thats good." "Let me assure you that when we talked about the Biella/Menkick annexation, my phone wasn't ringing off the hook. As a matter of fact, I didn't have one phone call. Not one person bothered to contact me on that. And when we had the public hearing, there weren't lots of people here, other than those folks we mentioned, disagreeing with what we had. So there hasn't been a large uproar of disapproval. What happens then is that the very structure that was set up to protect the citizens actually hurts the citizens." "Personally I am going to vote against these petitions because I feel thats what the City of Louisville wants -- the majority of the City of Louisville wants -- and I feel we are going to have to send it to the vote of the people, but I feel bad about that because I feel thats a waste of the City's money." Mohr asked if Mr. Hager, Superintendent of Boulder Valley School District RE2, would answer a few questions. Mohr asked where the City of Louisville stands in relation to the total quality of education in the rest of the County. Mr. Hager stated that comparatively, this district is right at the top, and around the nation, this district is significantly achieving at a higher rate on standardized achievement tests. Hager explained that achievement tests are only one indicator. "It tells what our kids can recall. It doesn't talk about higher order of thinking skills or how they think, how they can go out into the labor force and so on." "I think that its impor- tant that when you start looking at this, you can't put a cause and affect relationship to this. I was confused a little bit in some of the conversa- tion between class size and housing students. There is really no cause and affect relationship between class size and achievement levels, unless you get down to a class size of 10-12 students. We have a housing problem in the Louisville area. But when you look at class sizes, our class sizes in Louisville are less than the average mean class size throughout the whole district. 9