Last night was Kirby’s chance to educate the community about his lease back school idea that he’s been cagey about these past few months. You can watch it here if you want the full experience. Up on the dais with Kirby was local business man Randy Cohen and who we must assume are the secret developers. One was John Garner (not 100% positive of his last name as it was hard to hear and not restated, but it is NOT Daniels)  who didn’t speak much, and Jeff Pacy of Municipal Acquisitions.  Since Jeff Pacy did a majority of the talking we think its relevant to share how his company describes itself:

So the gist of the presentation was this:

-We can make all your wildest school construction dreams come true!

-Why have 2 schools when we can give you all four?  Plus shiny new laptops to boot!

-Yeah, our numbers may be off, but who needs accuracy?

-Opportunity costs of not doing this are tremendous! This will attract new teachers for how can they resist all the new buildings! (Somehow we think salaries are a tad more important).

-Yes, we must make a return on our investment and you will pay millions upon millions more than if you used a no interest government bond. But how do you expect us to compete with that?

-Prevailing wage and we assume county ethics laws would not apply to privately built structures. Hmmm.

So it kind of sounds like in order to get all these schools at once we would be paying this company millions upon millions in extra cash over the next 30 years.  One of the Yokel’s favorite county employees, Rick Harcum, very politely tells Kirby and friends that as a numbers guy it just doesn’t make any sense to pay this kind of money when other, better options are available. Jan also makes sure they know that because of our AAA rating, we can borrow money at the low rate of 2.62% which throws their numbers off even more. We also hear from the COF of FCPS who has to correct some of their math on the portables. Overall, we sensed an enormous amount of skepticism from those who asked questions.

Excepting of course Billy and Tony who got up there only to try and showcase the positives of this idea. Their questions were transparent and frankly too embarrassing to even speak of.

So after months of build up, Kirby didn’t do a good job selling this idea. Says there will be another workshop, but we doubt it will lead to anything. We need good ideas on how to finance everything we need, and sorry #, but this doesn’t look like it’s the one!