A fall in home valuations has complicated MPUSD’s school-improvement measure.

When Monterey Peninsula School District Superintendent Daniel “PK” Diffenbaugh came on the job this summer, his key priorities were visiting every school in the district and connecting with staff. He’s also had to wrap his head around the nuances of Measure P, a $110 million school improvement bond approved by over 70 percent of voters in 2010.

The district has already spent about half the bond money on critical health and safety upgrades, but now finds itself in the tricky position of not knowing when it can access the other half. Some projections put the date as far out as 2020.

“We haven’t determined a way forward, because we want to make those decisions on the best available information,” Diffenbaugh says. “There’s a lot of moving parts around the data.”

At issue is a promise the district made to voters when it put the measure on the ballot: At no point would homeowners pay more than $30 annually per $100,000 of their homes’ assessed value. The problem? Assessed home values within the district fell 2.9 percent in 2011, 1.7 percent in 2012 and 0.03 percent in 2013.

At current home values, the district can’t issue another series of bonds without exceeding the $30 dollar threshold, but Diffenbaugh says he’s encouraged by data coming in for 2014: Assessed home values in the district have gone up 3 percent.

“We made assumptions at the time that the assessed values would remain flat,” he says. “We thought it was a conservative estimate.”

The district board approved a $38,500 facilities review on Aug. 26, to be performed by School Services of California, an education consulting firm. SSC will complete its review in November.

“We want to fully assess our current facilities, needs and what we’ve accomplished to date,” Diffenbaugh says. “Creating a new gym, a new performing arts center, those types of things have to happen after basic infrastructure upkeep.”