Things are messed up in Mapleton.
Business owners in southern Adams County are fighting measures to repair the aging schools where many of them were educated. The feud is bitterly dividing the close-knit descendants of Italian immigrants who settled there on truck farms.
“This is a tragedy, creating tensions I never, ever thought I’d see,” said Mapleton school board member Norma Frank, born and raised in the area.
“Guys we grew up with are putting their profits over the education of our kids,” said former administrator Sam Molinaro, who is leading the push for measures 3A and 3B.
The district formed in the mid- 1950s when suburbs sprawled to the farmland north of Denver. None of its 16 schools was built later than 1963.
Foundations are cracking. Roofs are leaking. Boiler rooms are flooding. Asbestos tiles are decaying. Two elementary schools don’t have playgrounds. And the district’s only indoor pool had to be shut down because of structural problems.
Fifth-graders on the Western Hills Elementary campus had to switch rooms last spring when a sewer pipe broke during CSAP testing.
“Sewer leaks smell so bad we have to close classrooms pretty regularly so the kids can concentrate,” Enrichment Academy director Lisa Marchi said.
“It’s kind of dumpy,” said Josh Murphy, a sophomore at Mapleton Early College High School, where water from drinking fountains runs brown.
Mapleton hasn’t floated a school bond since 1993. Compared with schools in Denver and Jefferson County, it spends, respectively, $1,014 and $1,023 less per student each year.
The district aimed to boost its funding last year when trying to pass $70 million in bonds. The measure lost by 307 votes.
This year, district officials scaled back their list, proposing $67 million in bonds and mill levies phased in through 2011. If approved, the measures would raise taxes on a $100,000 home by $100 a year. For businesses worth $1 million, school taxes would jump $3,671 annually.
“That’s too much,” said Mike Paulino, an alumni of Mapleton High School and vice president of Paulino Gardens nursery. “It’s the amount and the timing of this, with the economy and all, that we have a problem with.”
Paulino, several other greenhouse owners and other local businessmen have formed Mapleton Citizens for Sensible Taxes to fight the measures with ads, billboards, robo-calls and mailers. The group hasn’t registered with the county as an issue committee.
“It’s our understanding that they should have,” said County Attorney Hal Warren.
Falsely, they claim “the average homeowner’s property tax will increase by 150 percent.” In fact, the measures would raise only the school portion of property taxes by that much, and only for businesses, not homes.
The opposition is being run by the company owned by Gov. Bill Ritter’s former campaign manager, Greg Kolomitz. The governor has blamed Kolomitz for using more than $200,000 raised for inaugural parties to pay off campaign debt. Campaign-finance rules ban the commingling of those funds.
Before the scandal, Kolomitz pushed several bond and mill-levy campaigns on behalf of school districts.
In Mapleton’s case, the district is being vastly outspent by Kolomitz’s moneyed benefactors, many of whom inherited the land where they do business but have moved their own families to tonier suburbs. Of Mapleton’s nearly 6,000 students, 65 percent are poor. Many have parents who work at companies owned by the “Sensible Taxes” backers.
“I don’t think that they’ve even thought of it at that level,” Frank said of the measures’ opponents. “Somehow they’ve lost any sense of a greater good.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
