As the South Portland School Department is inviting members of the public to tour the city’s high school to convince them costly renovations are necessary, a building committee met in Westbrook Tuesday to update the public on the plans for a new middle school.
While the two projects are both being planned in the interest of students, they couldn’t be more different in the way the two school departments have gone about getting the approval of voters.
While Westbrook voters easily approved paying for the new $33 million middle school in a referendum last May, the South Portland School Department will be lucky to get the approval of voters this November for $55 million in renovations to the city’s high school.
If recent history is any indication, voters need compelling reasons to spend large amounts of local tax dollars on school construction projects that are not receiving any money from the state. Just look at Scarborough, where last fall, voters rejected spending $38.3 million on rebuilding Wentworth Intermediate School and $16.5 million on renovations to the middle school.
Both schools needed improvements – to address overcrowding at the middle school and building and safety code violations at Wentworth – but the problems weren’t serious enough to cause the state to kick in money to help pay for the projects.
In contrast, Westbrook waited until the state was willing to pick up $26 million of the cost of its new middle school, even though the problems at Wescott Junior High had been evident for years. Residents will pick up the remaining $7 million and change. What that money was paying for was laid out clearly by the school department in the weeks leading up to the election. A total of $3.5 million was budgeted for increasing the size of the cafeteria, gymnasium and administrative offices beyond what the state would pay for. An additional $4.1 million to pay for an auditorium was broken out as a separate project that voters could reject or support without rejecting the entire school.
While the South Portland School Department has presented voters with a litany of problems – some of which seem serious and some of which seem minor – it’s unclear how the entire $55 million price tag breaks down.
Replacing the building’s heating and ventilation system, ridding the building of asbestos and mold and making the building handicap accessible are serious problems that are going to need to be addressed at some point, but it’s not clear how much of the $55 million cost these problems represent and how immediate the need is for each of them.
Instead of breaking these costs down and giving voters options, the South Portland School Department has focused on minimizing the tax impact the renovations would have on residents. An informational flyer produced by South Portland schools is selling the renovations as no more expensive than a cup of coffee, when it’s averaged weekly and spread out over the course of a 20-year bond.
While that might be a good strategy for an infomercial, it’s not really appropriate for a government department that is offering it up as information, particularly when South Portland might be coming back soon to ask resident to borrow more money to fix problems at the city’s two middle schools and refurbish the armory.
Westbrook will have a new middle school soon because the school department waited for years, until the project was eligible for money from the state. Even then, it offered voters the option of rejecting a portion of the project – the auditorium – if they considered it too expensive.
More communities should take this conservative, sensible approach, rather than pursuing large public projects, which are no doubt attractive to the public officials championing them, with the zeal of someone working on commission.
Brendan Moran, editor
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