SAGINAW, Mich. – If homeowners in Michigan’s Saginaw school district are a little angry the next time they write a check to cover their property taxes, it will be perfectly understandable.

MLive.com reports that leaders of the financially beleaguered district have agreed to close an elementary school at the end of this academic year that taxpayers spent $2.9 million to renovate in 2010.

The expensive improvements for the soon-to-be-defunct Houghton Elementary School were part of a larger $70 million bond project that voters narrowly approved back in 2004. Homeowners will be paying off the school bond for roughly 20 more years, the news site notes.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

District leaders didn’t want to close the building, but decided they had to as part of a larger deficit-elimination plan that was required by state officials.

The district has been under state oversight since 2011.

Obviously some questions have to be asked.

While it’s clear that school officials couldn’t have known about their present financial problems back in 2004, when they requested taxpayer approval of the bond issue, they must have known there were money headaches on the horizon by 2010, when the building was renovated.

After all, the state chose to intervene one year later, based on the ugly financial facts.

Could they have been expected to see the writing on the wall – particularly if enrollment was declining – and think twice about spending all the money that taxpayers approved for building renovations?

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

Perhaps they should have stalled their construction plans by a few years, to see how finances panned out, and how many buildings would eventually be necessary for daily operations.

This situation has the distinct odor of poor planning and mismanagement. We hope taxpayers and local reporters are interested and brave enough to ask a few key questions and demand prompt answers.

At the very least, we hope a quality charter school is allowed to use the space, so students and taxpayers will get some sort of return on the investment.

EAGnews has not studied the specifics of the Saginaw Public Schools’ financial woes, but here’s what we do know: Many of the district’s employees – teachers, secretaries, maintenance workers, bus drivers and aides – belong to a labor union and have a collectively bargained contract.

A typical collective bargaining contract, in turn, contains rigid pay schedules that award annual pay raises to employees just for – as the Bee Gees might say – “staying alive.” Most school union members – presumably including Saginaw’s union members – also receive a generous benefit package and a taxpayer-provided pension plan.

The result is that school districts end up spending 70 to 80 percent of their annual budget on personnel costs. The only way district leaders can get those labor costs down is by having an ugly showdown with the unions during contract negotiations.

Since many school district leaders are more concerned about keeping the peace with the labor unions than in balancing the budget, it’s very common for school districts in labor-friendly states and communities to run huge deficits. Such districts almost inevitably fall into this vicious cycle: Declining tax revenue results in fewer school services and programs for students, which results in more families leaving the district, which results in declining tax revenue.

That appears to be happening in Saginaw, though, as we said, EAGnews hasn’t examined the details in-depth.

Saginaw homeowners won’t be pleased to know that their taxes helped remodel a now empty school. But if the district doesn’t get its labor costs under control, we suspect it won’t be the last time that happens.