Board of Investments and fiscal staff outline loans, major maintenance aid and MARA modeling

The commission heard two briefings on school facilities funding and financing options.

Dan Villa, executive director of the Board of Investments, described the intercap program, a revolving statewide bond pool now financed through the board's short-term investment pool. The program offers rapid, low-cost loans (typically under $1 million) for eligible uses including roof and boiler replacements, HVAC, equipment, technology and, increasingly, land for teacher housing. Villa said the program is benchmarked to the one-year Treasury rate plus 10 basis points and that the intercap pool currently totals about $69 million. "It is essentially a book-bridal pool program," Villa told the commission, noting quick turnarounds and underwriting tailored to local governments.

Joe Tream of the Legislative Fiscal Division summarized MARA's (Modernization and Risk Analysis) approach to facilities. MARA plans to use the 2008 statewide facility condition inventory as a baseline, update it for facilities built or renovated since then, and model replacement-value-based spending bands that indicate whether districts are maintaining, falling behind or closing gaps. Tream cautioned that historical spending alone cannot identify backlog; facility-condition assessments or refreshed inventories are required to estimate deferred maintenance accurately.

Pat and staff reviewed the major maintenance aid ' a state program that sets a per-district "box'" and fills it with local permissive levies and an equalized state match. Recent statutory changes (HB515) expanded box sizes and equalization levels; uptake rose to roughly 300 of ~400 districts. Staff noted some smaller districts had missed application deadlines or lacked capacity to use the program, which remains primarily district-driven despite increased state appropriations.

Commissioners discussed whether existing statutory mechanisms unintentionally disincentivize district reorganization, and raised questions about how state support should be coordinated with local decisions about school operations. Staff and Villa said the intercap tool can help with episodic capital failures (e.g., failed boilers), while MARA aims to provide the longer-term visibility that policymakers need to craft multi-year strategies for facilities investments.

The commission requested more granular MARA outputs tying district-level spending, backlog estimates and prioritized projects to potential funding levers.