Nearly every number in the overrun debate — on the "no" site, and in the arguments against it — traces to the Moss Adams evaluation, a snapshot taken in 2021, midway through the program. That leaves an obvious question nobody's talking points answer: what happened by the end? We answered it from district sources only, and the answer is that the mid-program numbers held.
Method. The district's own Jeffco Builds map publishes, for each school site, a planned budget, changes, and a final total budget, with the district's stated reasons for each change (data retrieved September 28, 2026). The per-school budgets voters were shown in the 2018 Flipbook are preserved in Appendices C and D of the district-commissioned Moss Adams report, hosted on the district's board platform. We joined the two, school by school — 138 sites matched, with each match verified against the budget record, and every extracted total reconciled to the source documents to the dollar. The full dataset is published in data/final-vs-flipbook.csv (see data/README for method and caveats).
Result. Measured against the budgets voters were shown in 2018:
- Confirmed 123 of 138 matched sites (89.1%) ended over their 2018 Flipbook budget. The 2021 evaluation's much-argued "89.3%" turned out to be an accurate description of where the program landed, not a mid-program artifact.
- Confirmed 88 sites (63.8%) ended more than $500,000 over, and 45 sites (32.6%) ended more than $1 million over.
- Confirmed In aggregate, the matched sites went from $489.5 million in 2018 Flipbook budgets to $681.2 million in final totals — 39% above what voters were shown.
Context that cuts both ways. Two splits matter before anyone reads that as a verdict:
- School closures moved money on purpose. The district tags 41 of the matched sites "Receiving School" or "Closing School" — budgets deliberately reshaped by the 2022 consolidation, not construction overruns. But excluding those sites makes the picture worse, not better: among the 99 sites untouched by closures, 92.9% ended over their 2018 budget.
- Even against the district's own revised baseline — the higher budgets it republished after the election (see The Two Flipbooks) — 85.6% of sites ended over, 57.6% by more than $500,000.
The money was there. None of this means the program ran out of funds. The district's own fall-2022 bond-update booklet puts the total program at $825,696,593 against the $567 million bond voters approved — the difference funded by roughly $118 million in bond premium, earned interest, and annual general-fund transfers. The district's framing: it would "complete every promised project plus many more." Both things are true at once: the funding never fell short, and the school-by-school price tags voters were shown were exceeded almost everywhere.
Why budgets moved, per the district. The district's own map tags the reasons, site by site: market conditions / materials availability (94 of 146 sites), hazardous-materials mitigation (93), scope change (83), closure-driven receiving/closing reallocation (41), unforeseen conditions (14), occupied buildings (13). Its booklet itemizes the big ones: the all-weather track and turf fields program grew from $15.0 million to $51.2 million (soil conditions requiring post-tension concrete); the Alameda addition from $19.1 million to $31.9 million (board-approved May 7, 2020, described as fulfilling a parity commitment); Columbine's renovation from $11.5 million to $18.1 million (utility work beyond original scope); Mount Evans' dining hall grew after fire-authority changes that followed the Marshall Fire.
On the inflation defense. Pandemic-era construction inflation was real, and the district's tags cite market conditions more than any other reason. But it cannot carry the whole explanation: by mid-2021 — with the program roughly half spent and the worst construction inflation still ahead — 71–89% of site budgets already exceeded their Flipbook figures, completed projects were running 28% over their own system-recorded original budgets, and scope change appears in the district's own reasons almost as often as market conditions. Inflation explains part of the overrun; estimation quality and scope growth, documented in the district's records, explain the rest.