Andover School Committee Chair Tracey Spruce said Thursday building a new high school should trump a bond downgrade that would increase the Town’s interest costs to borrow in the municipal bond market.
“It’s not clear to me [a downgrade] matters much. [If] we’re cloaking this in fiscal responsibility, I think we really have to consider how responsible that is,” Spruce said. “If this is not the project that does it, something else will.”
The comments came at Thursday’s school committee meeting, three days after the select board added an article to the Nov. 20 special town meeting asking for $500,000 to conduct a study on whether the Town could make renovations to extend the life of the existing building until the Town’s debt profile improves, and it could receive state aid to offset the cost. Special town meeting will also be asked to approve $1.3 million for a detailed schematic design of the new building.
Spruce suggested Andover is facing a bond downgrade even if it doesn’t move forward with the new school.
“What it means is we’re not doing any other borrowing between now and the time we build a new high school, which we’re being told with this interim thing is 10 to 15, maybe even 20 years away. That’s simply not realistic at all, Spruce said. “
Town Manager Andrew Flanagan estimates a downgrade would kick in if the Town borrows more than $50 million to $60 million. The Town’s debt profile will improve as existing debt is retired, and the Town could have a chance of getting Massachusetts School Building Authority money if it waits until the West Elementary School project closes out in 2026.
The school committee will vote Oct. 30 on the recommendations it will make to special town meeting. School committee member Susan McCready echoed building committee member Shannon Scully’s comments at Wednesday’s quad-board meeting, saying the $500,000 was unnecessary.
“We’ve gone through that process already prior to the end of our high school facility study committee being formed,” she said.
School committee member Sandis Wright, however, said he was “okay” with special town meeting approving the $500,000 interim plan study if officials could better articulate what it would determine.
“I mean, $500,000 in the scheme of a project that’s half a billion — if we can get a more concrete plan solidified in the event that the community doesn’t support this, I’m okay with trying to do that in a parallel path so that we aren’t starting not from scratch,” Wright said, It’s “starting to look at what can we do if we don’t get support from the community on whatever the outcome is from the schematic design?”
What is the other big borrowing that we will need to do before 2040, Tracey? Many have been asking for that.
Broken thinking to say that, because we have been spending and borrowing more than we should, limits no longer matter and the checkbook is wide open.
The top heavy management organization is a testament to over spending.
Kevin is spot on with his comment regarding the blank checkbook “money is no object” thinking of the School Committee and the financial irresponsibility of its Chair implying, as she recently did, that it’s no big deal to have your credit rating downgraded even though the Town Manager’s financial analysis shows that a bond rating downgrading will add tens of millions in ADDITIONAL interest expenses for those items that require the Town to borrow money to fund those items. Add this all up and it will cause a homeowner’s annual property taxes to explode by over $3000 per year once all the additional interest expenses from a bond downgrading are added to the astronomical cost of a new high school building and outfitting a new building that this group is trying to shove down the Town’s throat.
Our School Committee, with its hand picked “building committee” , has become so fixated on demolishing our current high school and replacing it with an extravagant new building that they have held AHS students hostage, for over a half dozen years now, to their fixation on getting a totally new building to replace a building effectively only 26 years old (given its total renovation and expansion in the late 1990s) when there have been much less expensive ways (under $50 million as Town Manager Flanagan and his staff have reported versus the half billion dollars the School Committee wants to spend for a new building) to address the legitimate maintenance and routine enhancement needs of our high school that could have been put in place years ago.
Had the School Committee accepted the fact that the Massachusetts School Building Authority, which subsidizes school building construction, has REPEATEDLY rejected (ten times !) Andover School Committee applications for financial assistance for good reason (that we already have a relatively young high school building) and pursued a much more practical upgrade solution for our current building, the past four or five years worth of AHS graduates would have benefitted from those upgrades to our existing high school building! Any deficiencies that the School Committee claims the kids in our high school are “suffering through” is all on the shoulders of the School Committee who could have, years ago, put forward a practical proposal for building enhancements rather than holding our high schoolers hostage to their fixation on needing a totally new school building.
The School Committee’s assertion that only a completely new high school building can deliver the legitimate upgrades needed at the high school is just pure fiction, a fiction the School Committee is pushing in their attempt to justify the unjustifiable. And the bottom line, as all respected educators will attest and which the facts and data very clearly show, is that a brand new high school building will not move the educational needle, will not improve the quality of education by one iota.
Article 7B in the Warrant for our upcoming Special Town Meeting will enable the Town to get a definitive design and definitive cost figure to do an upgrade and enhancement to our current high school building at a fraction of the astronomical cost of demolishing our current high school and building an entirely new building. Article 7B finally brings sanity on what to do at the high school compared to the fixation the School Committee has on an unjustified total building replacement scheme.
I honestly have no idea how the School Committee concluded that spending $450,000,000 was the only solution to what would appear to be (in my ignorance?) a small overcrowding issue at the high school. Maybe that’s a problem – how much effort have they put into educating Town residents? Absent such information, I have to ask: when one’s house (regardless of age) doesn’t meet one’s needs, do we tear it down and build another, or renovate to add space and modern features? As to quality of education, I’d think paying teachers and staff more (and or adding some) would go a lot further than new bricks and mortar. The continuing adversarial relation between the teacher’s union and the School Committee is not a good look for the town, and what impression does it give the students? With both issues apparently at a critical point, where can residents best spend limited funds? It sure would be good to have a few options, along with the pros and cons of each.
A couple of comments. The building most certainly was not totally renovated in the 90s.
The plan behind the $500,000 was developed by Town administration with no input from the School side.
This is the most financially irresponsible comment from a public servant that I think I have ever read.
We must take emotion out of this decision, and remind ourselves/teach our young about the importance of maintaining a balanced budget. Budgeting often means making sacrifices to allow for spending in other areas. We just chose to endeavor on two massive school projects nearly simultaneously. Let’s live with that decision for a while, and let’s put off the high school until we have state support and have paid off some debt. Especially with the cost of living skyrocketing as it is.
-a young homeowner in Andover. Ready to raise a family here. Inflation and tax increases making it too expensive.
Since West Middle also needs upgrades, perhaps we should look into a combo school if we must build something new; I believe it was cheaper to build High Plain/Wood Hill than to build each one alone.