New Capital Project Vote Considered
by Alex Brooks
The Hoosick Falls School Board held a work session meeting on Thursday November 15 to discuss if and when to hold another Capital Project vote. The last two capital project proposals were rejected by the voters.
Sentiment among the various members of the Board was strongly in favor of doing a Capital Project, because they believe there is quite a lot of work that urgently needs to be done on the building – bathroom renovations, heating system replacement, asbestos removal, technology upgrades, and lighting upgrades – and without a capital project any work done on those things would be paid entirely from local taxes, whereas with a capital project 80% of the cost would be paid by State aid.
Board President John Helft said if you look at the District’s finances over the next 5 to 10 years, local property tax increases are much more likely if the District does not do a capital project. “It’s going to cost us so much more money if we don’t do this project,” said Helft.
Superintendent Ken Facin said, “We are in great financial shape for a Capital Project.” He said because the bonds from two previous capital projects will be paid off soon, there will be room in the budget for the payments on a new capital project. He also noted that the District has reserves that can be devoted to covering the local taxpayers share of the Capital Project cost.
District Business Administrator Emily Sanders described to the Board in greater detail what the impact of the project on local taxpayers would be. She said the numbers she had gathered were preliminary figures and she was not ready to present them publicly, but her conclusion was that the impact on local taxpayers would be less than half of what it was when a capital project was last presented to the voters a year ago.
The Board agreed to stick with the same architects who prepared the plans for the last Capital Project vote, a team from Synthesis Architects led by James Graham, and to ask them to prepare new figures for a capital project vote. The Board plans to vote in January on whether to schedule a new Capital Project vote. If they go forward with it, the vote would probably be in early March. If the voters approve, it would take about a year to draw detailed plans and get them approved by the State Education Department, and work would probably commence at the end of next school year, in June of 2020.
At this meeting Board President John Helft also reported the District’s small boiler broke down, and is being repaired at a cost that will probably be somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000. He noted that this kind of emergency repair is an expensive and inefficient way to manage school facilities. He said even if a new heating system is approved as part of a capital project in March, the District still has to get through this winter and next with the current heating system, which could prove to be troublesome. He said of the boilers now heating the school, “It’s not a question of if they will go down, it’s a question of when they will go down.”