So there's a referendum on the ballot in November, to make an adjustment to something called the Minnesota Permanent Schools Trust Fund distribution formula. It's a referendum question. And this is something that was actually established in 1857.

The proposed change to the distribution methodology would have a portion of the corpus be used. So the proposal is that 4.5% of the three-year average of the assets of the fund, it would include investment earnings on the principal corpus, as well as part of the principal corpus in the years when investment earnings themselves didn't come up to 4.5%.

So, if folks are voting, they should make sure to flip the ballot over and fill in whatever their answer is on this question, so they don't inadvertently elect something they would've chosen to do otherwise. So yeah, it has to be over 50% of the ballots cast. So if you cast a vote for governor and other offices, et cetera, but you don't fill in the blank, it's still a ballot cast so that it does basically effectively become a no vote.

In this contract, the members will get step movement in both years. They'll get additional increases to the salary schedule of 2.43% in year one, and 2.4% in year two. They will also get increases to insurance contributions, and this TA is within the allocated board authority.

The group will receive a $1 per hour increase to wages in year one, and 75 cent to wages in year two. This group does not have a step schedule. They'll also receive increases to insurance, and again, this is settled within board authority...

I just want to reiterate some thanks to Angie and the negotiating teams on behalf of the district in both sets of negotiation and to the employee groups in Nutrition Services and in MISA for doing this in such a productive and collaborative way.

These bonds are used to pay for next summer's long-term maintenance projects. We still have new construction going on, which is very exciting. But we also still have about 1.9 million square feet of building space that we have to maintain, much of which is over 50 years old.

But we did sell these bonds at 3.63% interest rate, which was a very good rate. And we actually hit the market a little bit before things started edging up a little bit the last few months, or the last few weeks, I should say, in late August because of what's still going on across the world.

These are the second tranche of bonds that the voters approved on November 4th of 2025. You'll recall that we issued about $55 million of the $85 million in bonding authority in December of 2025...

The interest rate was 5.07%, which is, in historical context, that's not a bad deal. Back before the Great Recession, if we got 5% on our geo bonds, we were actually really ecstatic. So it's still a very good interest rate, and it was, in some respects, a little bit of a defensive move in that we're concerned that rates might still keep edging up over time.

Our credit quality of being AAA is recognized in the market, and it is very strong. There's only about 90 school districts out of 13,000 that have a AAA bond rating, and so we are recognized as a very safe bet to put your money away and that we will pay you back with interest.

This phase is actually the construction of the gymnasium performance area, the additional science rooms, and then the small group rooms and additional restrooms at Minnetonka Middle School West.

So, the low bid is Rochon Corporation at $13,810,000. So that is basically about $1.8 million below the dollars allocated out of the bond proceeds to cover this part of the construction. So, we're under budget so far...

The construction consists of, again, a gymnasium with a performance venue attached, four science rooms, and then restrooms and small group rooms.

But the low bid is from Jorgenson Construction Company in the amount of $15,789,000. So that's $7.7 million below the amount budgeted based on the original estimating. So between these two items, we are under budget so far, knock on wood, by about $9.5 million.

We're utilizing a construction methodology on the gymnasiums that has some precast panels, and we've used those before at some of our other buildings. And so you dig the foundation, get it ready to receive the panels, which are the wall panels, and they're expecting us to have the wall panels arriving in January at West Middle School, and probably February or March after they get everything set up and ready to go. So it's going to go fast once we get rolling.

This is one way that, with a lot of the hamstring that we get from the state of Minnesota, this is one tool that we can at least use to set something up to help the district continue to achieve long-term success and continue to help students thrive into the future.

So the document has been reviewed by them and peer reviewed by them internally, and they say it's ready for prime time and for us to be able to adopt. So we're recommending adoption of our trust fund document, and even though we've been able to accept donations, it just puts the final imprimatur on it, saying we're open and ready to accept donations from the public if they are so inclined.

No questions. Just wanted to thank you again for your work on this and your inspiration for this, and just remind people that when you first brought this to the finance advisory committee as an example, they were very enthusiastic. They had some anticipation that this could happen and were really excited that it was moving forward, and I know that's shared by other members of the community as well. So it's really nice to have this before us tonight to make it official.