The following letter to the editor was submitted by Andover resident Joel Blumstein (photo, above). The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Andover News. You can learn more about our policy on opinion and commentary on our Mission and Policies page.
Several people have asked why Andover should spend $1.3 million to complete the schematic design for a new Andover High School if they already know how they feel about the issue. What additional information will be gained by proceeding with the design? The answer is “a lot.”
The remaining design work to be completed over the next six months is where important decisions on building design will be made and serious consideration given to value engineering – reducing costs while retaining educational and other values. We did this to great effect during the design of the soon-to-be completed West Elementary and Shawsheen Preschool, eliminating numerous features from the original design with significant savings. I expect the AHS Building Committee will do the same.
This time also will allow Town officials to pursue sources of funding, whether within existing budgets or from outside sources, which can mitigate the impact on taxpayers. Only when these things are done will the true cost to taxpayers of a new school be known. Only then can a truly informed decision be made at a future Town Meeting on whether to proceed with the project.
A decision of the magnitude of whether to build a new AHS – among the most important in the Town’s history – deserves to be made only after the most complete information possible is available. I believe most fair-minded Andover residents will agree and why I strongly encourage a Yes vote on Article 7A at Town Meeting on November 20th.
Joel Blumstein
Andover
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Mr. Blumstein’s letter to the editor supposed rationale for our town spending ANOTHER $1.3 million for design work on top of the almost two million dollars our School Committee has already spent getting engineering design work performed for this proposal just does not hold water.
And as we just learned at the most recent Select Board meeting, the design work that has already been done for this proposal, which fails all tests for a completely new school building being justified and that already has a price tag approaching half a billion dollars, has ignored some very major costs associated with the proposal: the cost of the extensive rework of the entire existing road system to accommodate the location of proposed new high school building and the rework of the athletic fields to accommodate the location of this proposed new high school building.
These very major roadwork and athletic field costs plus all of what are called “soft costs” of a new building plus the tens of millions of dollars in higher interest costs taxpayers will have to bear on the bonds to cover the proposal, given that our town has been advised by the bond ratings agencies that our bond rating will definitely be lowered if we go out to borrow half a billion dollars, will push the total cost of this project well north of half a billion dollars and increase average home property taxes by around $3000 per year (and likely more), making Andover even more unaffordable for young families to move here to live and highly unaffordable for the large number of seniors in our town living on fixed incomes, pushing many of our town’s seniors out of their homes as property taxes go ballistic were this new building proposal to go forward.
What is sad is that the School Committee’s fixation on this unjustified “demolish and build a totally new building” proposal, starting the first time that the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) rejected the request for MSBA to subsidize a new high school (the School Committee’s application now having been rejected TEN times by MSBA) – MSBA saying to the Andover School Committee in its multiple rejections to subsidize a new high school that a completely new high school building is not justified – has stood in the way of the town pursuing the very reasonable option of enhancing and upgrading our current high school building, such enhancements and upgrades costing one tenth the cost of demolishing and building an entire new school building. These enhancements and upgrades could have been completed four to five years ago had the School Committee not been fixated on getting a new building and only a totally new building.
What that means is that the past four or five graduating high school classes plus everyone currently in the high school could have had the benefits that these kinds of enhancements and building upgrades provide, the benefits the School Committee is trying to claim only a new building can deliver. In simple terms, it has been the School Committee’s fixation on getting a new building and only a new building that has kept eight to ten year’s worth of high school classes from benefiting from school building upgrades and enhancements that can readily address the claimed deficiencies in our high school building. These claimed deficiencies could have very readily been rectified years ago, with the full support of the community, had the School Committee not been fixated on getting a new building only, and by its fixation, holding eight to tens year’s worth of high school classes as hostages to the claimed deficiencies and used as pawns in the arguments being made to push for a new building and only a new building.
These enhancements and upgrades to our existing school building can begin delivering real benefits to students without spending half a billion dollars on a completely new building, and many years sooner than a new building can. A half billion dollar building will cannibalize the Town’s ability to pay for what takes place INSIDE of classrooms – the actual teaching. As I’ve learned as a student, as a parent, as a grandparent, as an educator, and as a former school committee member, it’s quality teaching and only quality teaching, not shiny new brick and mortar, that delivers an education.
Bob Pokress
We don’t need precision to know we can’t afford this now – even if we miraculously cut the cost in half it would use up all of our available debt capacity and then some. In fact, recommending that we spend another $1.3M in light of this obvious truth is the kind of irresponsible use of taxpayer funds that makes many of us nervous that the building committee’s priorities and values are out of step with the majority of our taxpayers’ priorities and values.
When we create a town where taxes are so high that the families who traditionally rely upon public schools can’t afford to live here anymore, I have to wonder what we are truly seeking to get out of this project.
Rather than speculating on what the cost of a new AHS would be, as Mr. Pokress and Willie do, let’s actually find out. That is what Article 7A does. If, at the end of the schematic design process, someone doesn’t like the final number, they can vote against the project then – at next year’s Town Meeting and at the ballot box. But, for now, let’s give all residents a chance to see what those final numbers are and to make an informed decision, when all the information is in, on whether to move forward with the project.
Mr. Blumstein seems to want Andover residents to ignore that upwards of two million dollars has already been spent on very extensive engineering and architectural design work and the costing out of a particular design that has led the School Committee to put forward cost numbers with decimal point precision. To quote Albert Einstein, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” As Jake Tamarkan said in his comments, any further precision is not going to show that this building proposal has gone from being totally unaffordable to now miraculously being affordable. To spend $1.3 million MORE to get the same answer – that the proposal to build a totally new high school building is unaffordable – is fiscal insanity.