Voters said “yes” in nearly 72 percent of Minnesota school districts that had a bond referendum in Tuesday’s election. Greg Abbott with the Minnesota School Boards Association says the approval rate wasn’t quite as high in rural Minnesota, because tax bases are generally higher in suburban and urban school districts. Abbott says, “That’s why [in] White Bear Lake you could pull off a 329-million-dollar bond, and it didn’t [just] squeak by. They had a pretty good margin of approval.”
The largest bond issue approved in Greater Minnesota was Rochester at 180 million dollars. Elk River voters approved a 113-million-dollar bond issue, Owatonna voters 112-million-dollars, and Moorhead area voters 110 million. Most of those include new buildings. The largest requests that failed in Greater Minnesota were in Mora for 59 million dollars and in the Gibbon-Fairfax-Windom School District for 49 million.