Portland Public Schools has a $2.9 billion wish list for a proposed construction and maintenance bond it plans to put before voters in May.

That massive tranche of money would pay for new high schools in three quadrants of the city, plus deferred maintenance, new athletics facilities, updated curriculum materials and more.

Were the district to settle on that figure, it would be far and away the largest bond ask in Oregon history, nearly 2 ½ times the $1.2 billion that the district sought and won approval for in 2020.

By comparison, the San Francisco United School District, which enrolls about 6,000 more students than Portland, is seeking approval for a $790 million bond this November, while voters in Austin, Texas — a district nearly twice the size of Portland — passed a $2.4 billion bond in 2022.

But several Portland school board members said the proposed request will be whittled back in the months ahead.

And, in an acknowledgment that they need more time to gauge the sentiment of restive voters before settling on a precise figure, school board members voted this week to push back the date of the bond election to May. Previously, the aim had been to put the question to voters this November.

School board chair Gary Hollands said bluntly that he thinks the district’s real facilities needs approach an eye-popping $5 billion, given the district’s stock of aging school buildings that have been under-maintained for years and the staggering costs of seismic upgrades in an earthquake-prone region.

But he also noted that the district is in the “throw in everything that we want stage,” of the bond planning process and that priorities will sharpen over the coming months.

The line items least likely to budge are around $1 billion to rebuild three of the district’s high schools: Jefferson High School in Northeast Portland, Cleveland High School in Southeast Portland and Ida B. Wells High School in Southwest Portland.

Originally, the $287 million cost of renovating and rebuilding Jefferson was to have been covered by the previous bond, passed by voters in 2020.

But the project was derailed after community pushback over plans to relocate the school’s 500 or so students to faraway Marshall High School during construction. Planners went back to the drawing board amid fears that Jefferson, which was once at the heart of Portland’s most historic Black neighborhood, would hemorrhage what remains of its student body. It’s already the district’s smallest high school by far.

Postponing and reimagining the project to allow students to remain on campus during construction drove up its price tag, adding an estimated $125 million.

That delay and budget creep has drawn some criticism, including from John Charles, CEO of libertarian nonprofit Cascade Policy Institute, who has suggested that the new Jefferson should be built for 1,000 students instead of 1,700 and that current students could go to Harriet Tubman Middle School or Benson High School during the remodeling as cost-saving measures.

Jefferson’s extensive cost overruns is not the only time in the last decade in Portland that a high school’s renovations have gone over budget and bled into the next bond. The costs of renovating Benson, which reopens this fall, spilled over from the 2017 bond into the 2020 bond.

District officials say the proposed 2025 bond will also include $450 million and $435 million, respectively, for Cleveland and Wells high schools, the last of the city’s comprehensive high schools to be renovated.

Beyond that, the other biggest-ticket potential asks on the wish list include the following:

• $334 million to purchase and train teachers on new curriculum materials over the next 14 years
  
• $400 million for deferred maintenance, including roof, mechanical, electrical and plumbing upgrades
  
• $300 million for widespread updates to athletics facilities, including $100 million for three strategically located multi-sport “athletic hubs,” one at Jackson Middle School in Southwest Portland, one at the Marshall High campus in Southeast Portland and one at the unused Whitaker Middle School property in Northeast Portland.
  

Notably not included in the bond planning process at the moment is the proposal by a nonprofit with which Hollands is affiliated, the Albina Sports Program, to lease the Whitaker Middle School site and parts of adjacent Fernhill Park to build a mega sports complex, with football and soccer facilities, a world-class outdoor 400-meter track and a plethora of indoor basketball and volleyball courts.

In October, the school board voted 4-2 with Hollands abstaining to allow district staff to open negotiations over the terms of a below-market lease with the nonprofit. At the time, Hollands suggested that funds to help build the complex could be included in a future bond.

So far, though, that line item has not materialized.

In the meantime, Metro, the Portland area’s regional government, is exploring plans to transform the Portland Expo Center in North Portland into a similarly tricked-out athletics complex, with ice rinks, basketball courts, an indoor track, a turf field and a training facility.

The larger the proposed Portland school bond, the longer it will take to pay off and the higher the interest payments would be, as plans call for keeping the current rate of taxation, which is $2.50 per $1,000 of assessed value on a home.

Should the district decide to go all in and seek the full $2.9 billion currently on its wishlist, for example, taxpayers would need to pay nearly that amount just in interest and would be on the hook for payments for almost 30 years, curtailing the district’s ability to float other bonds in the meantime.

— Julia Silverman covers education policy and schools for The Oregonian/OregonLive.com. She can be reached via email at jsilverman@oregonian.com. Follow her on x.com at @jrlsilverman.