After the Cullman City Council agreed to pledge a portion of its half-cent sales tax to local education efforts, the Cullman City School Board issued roughly $32 million in municipal bonds to fund upcoming capital improvement projects Tuesday, Nov. 19.

The bonds were divided into two separate series. The first — and largest — series of bonds totaled just under $30 million and will mature during the course of 30 years. The second, supplemental series of bonds — around $2 million — will mature between seven and eight years. The city of Cullman has pledged to continue providing a portion of its half-cent sales tax to the school board until the second series of bonds mature.

Matt Adams, with Raymond James, said the company has been working with CCS chief financial officer James Brumley for nearly a year to gather as many investors as possible in an effort to lower the bond’s interest rates. That pre-planning resulted in the interest rate coming in nearly half a percentage point under what was originally anticipated.

Adams said several local banks, mutual funds, hedge funds and insurance companies purchased bonds. He also said individual community members contributed to just under $1 million to the total bonds purchased. Most of those purchases, Adams said, came in smaller chunks of under $10,000.

“You think about how many pieces it takes to piece together $900,000 out of $10,000 orders and that means there were a lot of individuals who decided to participate.

In total, Adams said $131.9 million were ordered, but only $32 million of those were being sold.

“What happens is when we have that amount of orders come in it gives us a lot of flexibility to cut that interest rate back and that’s how we were able to get it down to 4.32 percent from the 4.75 percent we were anticipating,” Adams said. “That’s about $200,000 less that we’re paying on the interest cost.”

The funds will be used for the construction of a career tech/STEM classroom addition at Cullman High School and additions and renovations to transform West Elementary into Cullman Intermediate School which will accommodate all the district’s 3rd-5th grade students. Both projects are set to begin construction early 2025.

Brumley said he would “say our capital projects are fully funded,” despite a slight shortfall which anticipated being made up by funding from the Alabama Lieutenant Governor’s Office that he believed would be announced in December.

“We’re short just a little bit, but I’m not going to give a number yet because we have one piece of pie that has not come in yet. That’s our Lieutenant Governor money. We’re banking on that money to come in to take up that shortfall and we should know that by Christmas Break. But, I feel confident those two projects are funded,” Brumley said.

Patrick Camp can be reached at pcamp@cullmantimes.com or at 256-734-2131 ext. 238.