On Tuesday, May 5, the voters of Saginaw Township will once again march to the polls to decide the fate of a Saginaw Township Community Schools (STCS) bond proposal. If you feel a profound sense of déjà vu, you are not alone. This marks the third time in exactly three years that the STCS Board of Education has asked this community to co-sign a massive, multi-generational debt package.
They asked us for a staggering $243 million in May 2023. We unequivocally said no. They came back just six months ago, in November 2025, asking for $169.2 million. We delivered a crushing, 62 percent rejection—a clear, undeniable mandate from the taxpayers.
And yet, here we are again. The district has repackaged their request into a $94.2 million proposal, slapped a "critical needs only" label on the cover, and expects voters to finally surrender.
This is not a democratic dialogue; it is a calculated consultant-driven strategy of attrition. The rubber stamp school board is relying on voter fatigue. They are betting that if they put a multi-million dollar tax hike on the ballot enough times, you will eventually get too tired, too busy, or too distracted to show up and vote "NO." If they get their wish, this election will be over before the voters even know it is happening.
This surprise election was only announced in February, and by March 26th absentee ballots will be sent out by the clerk. Recent trends in absentee voting show most people are voting absentee now, so the election will effectively be over by April 1st.
Don’t accept the school board’s narrative that this $94.2 million bond is a modest, bare-bones compromise designed to help your children. You need to look at the actual math. The official Form 3881 application submitted by STCS to the Michigan Department of Treasury—a document they do not mail to your house because they don’t want you to see it, but which is available for the public to read at TaxHike.org—reveals a very different story.
When you strip away the glossy campaign mailers and the emotional appeals regarding "the kids," the Treasury data exposes the ugly truth about modern school bonds. This proposal is not driven by the urgent needs of Saginaw Township families or the academic requirements of our students. It is a highly lucrative, government-contractor-driven wealth transfer. It is a system designed to extract wealth from working-class taxpayers and funnel it directly into the pockets of insider professionals, architectural firms, construction managers, and financial consultants.
The Government-Contractor Industrial Complex
To understand why STCS keeps bringing these bonds back to the ballot, you have to understand how the school bond industry actually works. School boards do not design these massive $94 million packages in a vacuum. They are guided, advised, and heavily influenced by a cottage industry of specialized consultants whose entire business model relies on convincing local municipalities to take on massive amounts of debt.
The architects who assess the buildings are the same architects who get paid millions to design the renovations. The construction management firms who tell the district what needs to be fixed are the same firms who collect a percentage of every dollar spent fixing it. The financial advisors who model the tax impacts are the ones who facilitate the borrowing.
It is an ecosystem built on an inherent conflict of interest. These insider professionals travel from district to district across the state of Michigan, selling the exact same dream: Your buildings are failing, your kids are falling behind, and the only solution is to borrow an astronomical sum of money.
They have every incentive to inflate the scope of the project, because their payday is directly tied to the size of the bond. To these out-of-town consultants, Saginaw Township is not a community of families struggling to balance household budgets amid staggering inflation and high grocery costs.
To them, Saginaw Township is simply a highly targetable tax base—a resource to be mined.
Following the Money: The $13.6 Million Grift
If you want to know who really benefits from the May 5 election, look at the Cost Summary Section of the district’s Form 3881 Treasury application.
The district has repeatedly told the public that this $94.2 million bond has been stripped down to absolute necessities—fixing leaky roofs, updating 90-year-old plumbing, and patching failing HVAC systems. They want you to visualize every single dollar going into bricks, mortar, pipes, and safety glass.
But the official Treasury documents tell a completely different story. Built directly into the $94.2 million sticker price is a staggering $13,655,387 dedicated entirely to professional fees. That breaks down to $5,058,899 in Architectural and Engineering costs, and an unbelievable $8,596,488 in Construction Management fees.
Let that sink in. Nearly $14 million of the money we are being asked to borrow—money we will be paying interest on for the next twenty years—will not fix a single boiler. It will not buy a single library book, pay a single teacher’s salary, or put a single new roof over a student's head.
It will go directly into the bank accounts of the elite consulting class.
When the school board says this bond is "for the kids," they are utilizing children as human shields to protect a massive corporate payout.
The children of Saginaw Township will not see a dime of that $13.6 million. But the taxpayers of Saginaw Township will be working to pay it off, with interest, until the year 2046.
The $11.3 Million "Contingency" Slush Fund
The financial revelations in the Treasury documents do not stop at consultant fees. In addition to the $13.6 million in soft costs, the district has carved out $11,381,275 labeled strictly as "Construction Contingencies."
A contingency fund is a financial buffer. It is a pool of extra money set aside for unforeseen costs, design changes, and mid-point construction escalation. In private enterprise, when a family builds an addition or a business renovates a storefront, budgeting a small contingency is prudent.
But in the realm of taxpayer-funded municipal bonds, an $11.3 million contingency is a slush fund. It represents more than 12 percent of the actual construction budget. The district is demanding that the taxpayers take out an $11 million loan just in case they need it.
We are repeatedly told that this bond has been heavily scrutinized and pared down to the absolute bare-minimum "critical needs." If the estimates are truly that precise, and the needs are truly that strictly defined, why is the district demanding an $11.3 million blank check?
History shows us exactly what happens to contingency funds in school bond projects once the election is over. Because the money is already authorized and sitting in an account, it inevitably gets spent. It gets quietly redirected by the school board and their construction managers toward pet projects, aesthetic upgrades, and administrative wish-lists that were never explicitly detailed to the voters.
It is a pool of unaccountable money, completely insulated from voter oversight. Between the $13.6 million in consultant fees and the $11.3 million slush fund, over $25 million of this $94.2 million bond is essentially dead weight—money that provides zero direct, tangible educational benefit to the students sitting in the classrooms.
The Grand Illusion: The "1 Mill" Deception
To sell this bloated, consultant-heavy package to the public, the school board and their financial advisors have deployed a highly deceptive marketing strategy regarding your taxes.
The official ballot language, and every piece of campaign literature the district produces, claims that passing this bond will result in an estimated "1.00 mill net increase over the prior year's levy." They want you to believe that your tax burden will only go up by a tiny, almost imperceptible fraction. They break it down to pennies a day, comparing it to the cost of a cup of coffee, attempting to shame anyone who would deny the district such a seemingly insignificant amount.
It is a deliberate manipulation of the baseline math.
Here is the reality the district is desperately trying to hide: If we vote NO on May 5, our school debt taxes are legally scheduled to plummet. Right now, in 2025, Saginaw Township taxpayers are paying a 2.50 mill debt levy to satisfy the district's old 2015 Refunding Bonds. But those 2015 bonds are in their final days. The Treasury application's "Existing Debt" schedules prove that those old obligations are virtually paid off.
If this new bond fails, our debt tax burden automatically drops to 1.40 mills in 2026. It drops again to 1.06 mills in 2027. And by 2028, it drops to absolutely zero.
When the district tells you this is "only a 1 mill increase," they are relying on the fact that you do not know about your impending tax cut. They are taking the new 3.50 mill heavy burden of the 2026 bond, subtracting the 2.50 mills you are currently paying on the old bond, and calling the difference a "1 mill increase."
By passing this bond, you are not just adding 1 mill to your tax bill. You are voluntarily forfeiting a massive, scheduled tax cut that you have rightfully earned after years of paying off the 2015 debt. You are allowing the district to intercept your tax relief before it ever reaches your wallet.
Once the old debt completely expires in 2028, the smoke and mirrors vanish. The true, unmasked cost of this new proposal will sit on our properties as a projected 3.50 mill burden for years.
As your property's taxable value increases—up to 5 percent each year under Michigan law—the actual dollar amount you pay to the school district will compound and grow relentlessly.
A family living in a modestly assessed Township home will find themselves paying hundreds of dollars more every single year, over and above the high property taxes they already pay, for the next two decades.
Nothing for the Kids: The Academic Disconnect
Perhaps the most tragic irony of this relentless push for infrastructure bonds is the complete lack of correlation between taking on massive facility debt and improving student outcomes.
As the advocates at TaxHike.org have repeatedly pointed out, there is a fundamental difference between an educational investment and an architectural empire.
If the school district was coming to the voters asking for funds to hire world-class reading specialists, implement cutting-edge mathematics curriculums, reduce class sizes, or provide intensive tutoring for students who fell behind, the community conversation would be entirely different.
Saginaw Township values education. In February 2024, this community generously voted YES to renew the district's operational millage, which funds the day-to-day operations and educational programs.
But a capital improvement bond does none of those things. Under state law, bond proceeds cannot be used for teacher salaries, textbooks, or classroom instruction. They can only be used for physical assets.
The district wants $94 million to enclose "open concept" classrooms, update security vestibules, and overhaul HVAC systems.
While updating a 1960s building is nice, putting a new multi-million dollar roof over a school does not teach a third-grader how to read. Building a state-of-the-art administrative office suite does not improve SAT scores.
We are being asked to mortgage our community's future to build a pristine, updated physical shell around an educational system that requires fundamental academic support, not just new plumbing.
The "beneficiaries" of new security glass and HVAC units are the general contractors installing them for a profit, not the children whose educational outcomes remain unchanged.
Building Empires for a Shrinking Population
The absolute height of fiscal irresponsibility in this proposal is the demographic reality of Saginaw Township. The district is asking taxpayers to take on $150 million in total debt (when including the $55.7 million in projected interest) to expand and overhaul facilities at the exact same time our student population is actively shrinking.
For the last 15 years, student enrollment in Saginaw Township K-12 schools has been in a steady, undeniable decline. According to the district’s own official enrollment projections included in the Form 3881 application—prepared by an independent consulting firm—that trend is guaranteed to continue. The district projects a further 2.6 percent drop in enrollment over just the next five years, falling from 4,200 students today down to 4,091.
Why are we being pressured to take out a $94 million mortgage to expand the physical footprint of a school district that has fewer students every single year? In the private sector, if a business is losing customers, it consolidates its real estate; it does not take out massive, high-interest loans to remodel empty space.
The school board is attempting to build and maintain architectural empires for a customer base that no longer exists.
The Economic Reality of Saginaw Families
The STCS Board of Education operates as if the taxpayers of Saginaw Township possess a bottomless well of disposable income. They do not.
Saginaw County is already one of the more highly taxed counties in the country. We rank in the top 21 percent of all counties nationwide for property taxes as a percent of median home value, and we rank in the top 16 percent for property taxes as a percent of median income. All of this occurs in a county where the median income is already 24 percent below the national average.
Our families are stretched to the absolute breaking point. Inflation has devastated household budgets over the last four years. The cost of groceries, utilities, auto insurance, and basic necessities has skyrocketed. Working-class families in Saginaw Township are sitting at their kitchen tables every month, making painful, difficult decisions about what they have to cut from their budgets just to survive.
Yet, the school board refuses to make those same difficult decisions. Instead of managing their multi-million dollar annual operating budget responsibly, prioritizing routine maintenance, and living within their means like the rest of us, they simply demand more.
They use the machinery of the government-contractor complex to generate terrifying reports about failing roofs and unsafe entrances, all to justify reaching into the pockets of the taxpayers to bail out their own delayed maintenance failures.
The Mandate is "NO"
It is time to end the cycle of taxpayer abuse. The voters of Saginaw Township have spoken clearly in 2023, and we spoke with overwhelming force in November 2025. The answer is no.
Bringing this proposal back for a third time in three years is an insult to the democratic process. It is a desperate attempt by the insider professionals, the construction managers, and the architects to secure their $13.6 million payday before the community realizes that their scheduled tax cut is about to be stolen.
Do not let election fatigue win. Do not surrender your scheduled tax relief to fund a $11.3 million slush fund. Do not let the government-contractor driven machine extract $150 million from our local economy for projects that provide absolutely no direct academic benefit to our students.
We must hold the line. We must demand that the STCS Board of Education focus its time, energy, and resources on educating our children, rather than acting as a real estate development firm for out-of-town consultants.
Mark your calendar for Tuesday, May 5. Go to the polls. Tell your neighbors. And vote NO on the Saginaw Township Community Schools Bond Proposal.
To see the official Form 3881 Treasury documents and the hard math for yourself, visit www.TaxHike.org.
info@review-mag.com
989-780-4162
Mar 04, 2026
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