State Changes Rules,
School Bond Cancelled
By Sara Nelson

Plans for a $12-million repair and renovation project at RUHS have been thwarted by state-imposed financing obstacles, board members heard at a special meeting last Monday.

And the only good solution depends on the state legislature, they said.

After more than four years of planning, the facilities committee and the architectural firm had drawn up a package that addresses a number of structural issues in the combined RUHS/RTCC building, including a leaking roof, fire egress updates, and electrical work.

At Monday’s meeting, the board had been expected to approve this final renovation package. It was also expected to vote to go ahead with a Nov. 6 bond authorization vote on the project.

However, after the presentation of the package by the facilities committee and Black River Design, OSSU business administrator Robin Pembroke delivered some bad news to the board.

Pembroke said in August she had asked the Department of Education for clarification about what kind of aid Randolph Union could expect from the state.

As Pembroke noted, it had been "up in the air" whether a school construction financing moratorium enacted by the legislature in May would apply to the RUHS project.

(In April, Department of Education construction financing expert Cathy Hilgendorf had said the project was in line to receive the hefty 30-50% reimbursement available to projects approved by the state.)

Pembroke heard back from the Department of Education about a week prior to Monday’s meeting, and the news wasn’t good.

Pembroke explained, first of all, that the retroactive moratorium would indeed apply to the RUHS project, meaning the board would not receive any state reimbursement were it to go ahead with the project, even if the moratorium were lifted in the future.

This was a situation the board had been prepared to contend with.

Superintendent Brent Kay said the board had been aware of the potential loss of funding since the moratorium passed.

"The chance of being able to go ahead with the project was slimmer without the $4 million from the state, but there was still a chance," Kay said.

However, that chance was reduced from slim to none by the second major financing obstacle Pembroke described.

Apparently, an unintended consequence of the moratorium is that money raised for unapproved school construction projects is classified as part of the school’s "equalized per pupil spending."

As such, it is subject to a dollar-for-dollar penalty if it exceeds the state’s "excess spending threshold" which is currently set at around $12,600 per pupil.

RUHS principal John Holmes said the bond issue would "certainly" put RUHS over the threshold, although exact figures for the size of the penalty hadn’t been calculated.

"The board decided that this is a financial burden we can’t ask voters to undertake," Holmes said in an interview later.

Kay agreed.

"No one was aware of the excess spending threshold issue," he said, "but once we knew about it, we knew the bond issue would be politically untenable.

"To ask the voters to add upwards of a million dollars to the project would be crazy."

Other board members pointed out the effect the financial burden would have on school programs. Holmes quoted board member Andy Becker as saying, "if the bond passed, we’d have a good roof but we’d have to gut the educational process underneath it to make the payments for the next 20 years."

Board chair Linda Minsinger said she was especially frustrated because the board has "worked so hard to come up with an excellent plan at a reasonable cost."

"We have researched and studied, had consultations, invited community and state expert opinions, listened to teachers’ and students’ pleas, and discussed student safety and disabled access issues," Minsinger said.

Bill Sugarman, a facilities committee member and the principal of the Randolph Technical Career Center, said the laws failed to take into account the school’s level of need.

"We were sensitive to the fact that this project would have an effect on taxes for voters and families in the tech center region, but we think we’ve gone about it in a way that’s not short-sighted," Sugarman said.

He pointed out that by working closely with construction experts, the board was able to shave millions of dollars off the original $22-million price tag for the project.

Future Options

Sugarman and Holmes said the board rejected the option of breaking up the extensive package of repairs into smaller pieces.

"The committee felt strongly that the current 20-piece package should remain intact rather than to do just the emergency pieces and lose the opportunity to include other cost-effective and common-sense upgrades," Holmes said.

"This is a complete package. There’s nothing extra, just the essential fixes. It’s workable, practical, commonsensical—and it’s what we need to do."

Sugarman, Holmes, and Kay agreed that the full-sized project will have to wait for legislators to lift the building moratorium or correct the excess spending threshold issue.

Whether either of these things is likely to happen "depends on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist," Sugarman said.

Alice Emmons, D-Springfield, the chairwoman of the House Institutions Committee, was non-committal on that question.

Emmons said she’d heard of perhaps a half dozen schools in a situation comparable to Randolph’s, and expected "more will start percolating" as it gets closer to the start of the legislative session, in January.

While Emmons said she was "sure this issue will be looked at," during the session, she gave the caveat that the legislature will have to wait until a plan is proposed by the Governor’s office.

Emmons said the moratorium was put in place to give the legislature time to "come up with a plan" to deal with a 15-year, $100-million backlog in school construction financing obligations.

If no plan is proposed, "then the moratorium will continue," Emmons said.

French Involved

Randolph Representative Patsy French said she hopes the legislature will be able to "come up with a plan" to fix the funding problem.

French said she also believes the RUHS project should have qualified for one of several moratorium exemptions the state is supposed to grant for projects that address health and safety concerns.

French said she has been "having conversations" with legislators to see if she can get the project approved on this basis.

"I don’t know if they’ll agree, but I think we shouldn’t have to wait until we have a mold problem to fix a leaking roof," she said.

With an exemption or other legislative action, Holmes said he hopes the project can go forward "as early as next May."

"It won’t take much to redo the package," he said.

"Everything’s in place—we’d just have to get revised quotes for the costs."

Holmes and Sugarman said that to increase the likelihood that the legislature will act, they will invite legislators to the school to see the condition of the building for themselves.

"You might not think a leaky roof sounds that bad, but when people come here and see huge barrels in the hallway collecting water, they say ‘we need to do something about this,’" Sugarman said.

Until the thicket of state financial barriers has been cleared, Holmes said both RUHS and RTCC hope to get by on money reserved in building maintenance funds.

"We hope that what we have set aside will get us through any emergencies," Holmes said.

In recent years, the schools have been diligent about setting aside hundreds of thousands of dollars of budget surpluses into the maintenance funds.

Although Kay did not point out this fact, it may have factored into his wry critique of the state moratorium situation.

Kay said that rather than the current construction funding system, in which "the squeaky wheel gets oiled," the state needs a facilities review committee to assess school needs in a consistent, objective way.

"We get into fiscal troubles when we don’t have a system in place to help us spend money properly."

Ironically, it is the students and teachers who, as Sugarman said, "go to school every day in a building where one classroom is under 60 degrees and another is over 80," who will feel the effects of the state’s fiscal troubles this winter.