This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
11/08/2016 03:30 PMShould the town undertake extensive repairs to a school that it may demolish in a few years? Probably not, which is why the recent Board of Education (BOE) decision to look closer into the possibility of a five-school model has influenced what projects may appear in the town’s overall spending plan over the next few years.
Now in its second year, the Capital Improvement Program (CIP), which replaced LOCAP as the town’s long-term capital spending plan, is designed to create one comprehensive document for all of the town and public school’s capital needs for the next five years and evaluate possible funding options. With possible changes and renovations to a variety of school facilities on the horizon, CIP and BOE Chair Jean Fitzgerald said the board has limited school facilities projects in the CIP.
“Based on the study, we are not going to do anything to schools that could potentially be closing, so what we stayed close to is public safety and environmental or legal obligations,” she said. “We kept to just things we have to do.”
For this fiscal year, those projects are limited to the removal of underground oil tanks at Jeffery Elementary, Island Elementary, and Polson Middle School.
“The Jeffery tank and the Island tank have already been earmarked for coming out and we have to take them out because... we don’t want any issues with soil contamination or things like that” and they are already past their expected life expectancy, she said. “We are required by law to take those out.”
Removals of the tanks, like the one at Jeffery, are listed in the CIP Capital Non-Recurring Expenditures (CNRE) budget for $78,000. The tank at Polson was originally scheduled to be pulled next fiscal year, but Fitzgerald said they are looking to move that project forward.
“Because it is fiscally responsible to do them all at once, we are going to pull it out even though it was slated a year out,” she said.
The only other major project at a school facility listed in the CIP is the reconstruction and expansion of the Brown Middle School parking lot. Under the five-school model, Brown Middle School would not be touched and Fitzgerald said this is a project that needs to happen.
“That facility is used for voting, it is used by the town for sports on the weekend, and we do not have adequate parking there so what ends up happening is people are parking illegally,” she said. “We really need to have an efficient and bigger parking lot.”
Additionally Fitzgerald said the upgrade to the parking lot is a safety and security priority. In the event of an emergency, Fitzgerald said it is important that Brown have two access points for emergency personnel, something it currently does not have. Behind the facility near the baseball fields is an old road that accesses a neighborhood behind Brown. In repaving the parking lot, Fitzgerald said the school could create another access point via that road.
“We don’t do anything with it [the road] right now, but if we decided to, it would allow a fire truck to come in the back,” she said. “Ideally if we do the parking lot over and we pave in back, it would be better access to the fields in the back, but it also would allow better access in an emergency for a truck to get in to the school from the backside.”
The project to repave the parking lot is listed in the CIP CNRE for fiscal year 2017-2018 for $236,061. Fitzgerald said there is room to adjust the CIP as more information becomes clear in the school study.
“The idea of the CIP is to allow us to plan out so once we finish our study phase of the school utilization then we will be able to look at if we need to add anything else in,” she said. “We won’t know that until the study phase, but that is the beauty of the CIP in that there is some fluidity in that plan...If something comes up, we are able to put it within the plan.”