Ball Charter School saves significant money through Arizona IDA bonds.

Phoenix – The Arizona Industrial Development Authority issued nearly $11 million in bonds for Ball Charter Schools to refinance previous debt and save significant money for the schools.

Ball Charter Schools operates three location in the East Valley and north Phoenix. The three schools enroll about 1,500 students with a capacity of more than 1,900.

“One of the Arizona IDA’s goals is to make borrowing money for charter schools as cheap as possible,” said Pat Ray, the Arizona IDA program manager. “This move frees up money for Ball Charter Schools to redirect more dollars into the classroom.”

The original bonds were used to build and upgrade the three campuses. The Ball Charter School financing helped one of longest standing charter school systems achieve significant savings. For the Val Vista campus, the refinancing brought its rate from a short-term 4.22% to a long-term, fixed rate of 3.76% and the refinancing of the prior debt for Dobson and Hearn campuses saved $159,076, while also maintaining valuable reserves that could help extinguish the debt those campuses have early.

“Ball Charter is taking advantage of the historically low interest rates that will allow the non-profit schools to redirect funds,” Ray said. “We are proud to support these schools in their efforts to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars.”

The Arizona IDA is a non-profit corporation formed in 2016 to make home ownership more affordable and issue conduit revenue bonds to lower financing costs for projects. While the enterprise receives no public funds, its surplus revenues are distributed to the Arizona Housing Trust Fund and Office of Economic Opportunity. Since its inception, the Arizona IDA has delivered about $60 million to the state.

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