HUNTINGTON – At a meeting of the Gateway Regional School Committee last night, a course of action was discussed and tabled for the committee’s next meeting regarding a plan for maintenance and capital needs for the district beginning in 2014 and ending in 2023.
Designed to handle maintenance projects ranging from replacements of flooring and WiFi access points around the district, to larger, big ticket capital items such as the replacement of building boilers and a district plow truck, the plan is seen as “an ongoing process of preventative care, repair, cleaning, and refreshing of the building, grounds, and technology infrastructure.”
School Committee Chair Gretchen Eliason alluded that the district would need to get creative to pay for the projects.
“We have multiple funding mechanisms,” she told the committee and the packed library audience. “We might try to put money away in a stabilization fund, we might try to cover these expenses in the operational budget each year or we may want to borrow money.”
Committee member Shirley Winer said that the committee had voted for this plan years prior, but that nothing had been done about it, and trying to sell residents of the seven Gateway communities on the added expense proved challenging.
“Part of the resistance from the towns the last time we brought it up was because the laws had changed between the time we got authorization for the fund, and the last time we talked about putting money in it,” Eliason said. “Originally, it was up to the towns to approve expenditures from the fund, and now it can be done with the approval of the school committee.”
A packet issued to attendees of the meeting detailed the maintenance and capital items along with their potential costs and a schedule with which the projects would be likely to finish. It also stated that the potential for implementing long-term capital projects is “based upon cost, finding funding, and priority-based need.”
“A lot of our ongoing maintenance work… we’re doing things that will allow us to save some money in long-term maintenance costs,” Gateway Superintendent Dr. David Hopson said, listing epoxy flooring as one of a slew of upgrades that will enable the district to cut back on future costs. “As we get that done, that cuts down on our use of chemicals to strip and wax, it cuts down on amount of time, and as you go through the schools, you’ll see they’re holding up pretty well.”
Hopson referenced ongoing capital items such as the district’s plow truck, which has been in use for seven or eight years.
“It’s probably time to renew (that truck),” he said. “We have a lot of capital projects. We were going to start replacing smartboards this year. We spent a lot of time with our tech people looking at whether we should do that, but in the end, we decided we’d upgrade our infrastructure for WiFi, which has allowed us to put off replacing our smartboards.”
Hopson stated that the state’s implementation of the PARCC pilot exam forced the district’s hand regarding WiFi upgrades.
Other capital items being pushed by district leadership include the regeneration of one district soccer field a year at a cost of $5,000, repair and/or replacement for the district’s main campus well, which would cost $25,000 to repair and $50,000 to replace, and $150,000 to tie into town water. The plan also proposes the replacement of four boilers around the district with two new ones for a cost of $190,000.
Additional long-term capital projects included in the plan are the replacement of the Gateway Middle School roof, which would run in the neighborhood of $75,000, the purchase of “mini-buses” for field trip and special education use at $40,000 apiece, roughly the same price as the proposed new plow truck, and the construction of a new maintenance storage facility at around $75,000.
The packet provided a timetable for these projects and added that they may require additional funding.
The purchase of the buses and the well would be wrapped up by 2016 to the tune of $130,000, with one of the boilers and a soccer field being replaced/regenerated in both 2017 and 2018, costing $100,000 both years.
2019 would see the middle school roof and another soccer field at $80,000 in funding requirements, while 2020 would have the district seeing clearly at a new maintenance storage facility and another regenerated soccer pitch for $80,000 combined.
“The middle school roof, while in good shape, is past its warrantee,” said Hopson. “It’s one of those bigger ticket items that you can’t split up in three or four years.”
The window of opportunity to repair or replace the well, the district’s most pressing capital item, is between 2014 and 2016, while the acquisition of the mini-buses will occur from 2015 to 2017.
The district hopes to replace the four boilers between 2015 and 2018, while it is shooting for between 2016 and 2020 for ball field regeneration, 2017 and 2021 for the middle school roof project, 2018 and 2023 for the maintenance storage facility project, and from now until 2023 for the replacement of the plow truck, epoxy flooring replacements, and other miscellaneous items such as custodial equipment, new computers and tablets, and various infrastructure repairs.
The committee members chose to take the information from the meeting back to their towns to share with their finance committees and select boards.
“These are the projects that are out there that will need funding eventually,” Eliason said before placing the item on the agenda for the committee’s next meeting.
