Board Reconsiders Bus Barn at High School

East Hampton School District officials have turned their attention back to the idea of building a maintenance depot and bus parking lot on the high school campus after learning that the property where the district leases a bus barn is in contract to be sold.

The one-acre site, at 41 Route 114 in East Hampton, is zoned for commercial or industrial use. It was listed at $3 million and had been on the market for only one week, Hal Zwick of Town and Country Real Estate said. He said he could not yet release the name of the buyer or the final price. J.P. Foster, president of the East Hampton School Board, is also a broker with Town and Country but has said he had no part in the sale.

  According to Richard Burns, the district superintendent, the bus barn lease, which runs through October 2017, will be honored. Mr. Burns plans to meet with the buyer this week, but neither he nor Mr. Foster would disclose who it is. Mr. Burns said the sale puts further pressure on the district for an on-campus facility, which would require financing through a bond referendum.

During the district’s school board meeting on Aug. 16, Mr. Foster said it had not been “prepared to move fast enough” to scoop up the property, which is owned by the Schaefer family, who used to operate the buses that transported East Hampton’s students. The district bought its own buses after the Schaefers closed their company in 2006, and it began leasing the property to park and maintain them. The lease costs just over $100,000 a year.

“Our process is more cumbersome than an individual buyer’s,” Mr. Foster said. “It would take us a good eight to nine months to get public approval, get the funding, and get it appraised. . . . and we can only pay for appraised value. That’s a cap for us. We are out of that arena. The public asked us to look, we did, and unfortunately, it’s not going to work. We have to look at plan B.”

School officials had been publicly debating whether to build a bus barn somewhere on district property since the fall, though the discussion was put on hold as they considered off-campus locations, including the East Hampton Town Airport. That option was ruled out because the airport is in Wainscott, outside district boundaries.

The district has projected that a facility could be built for about $4.75 million, and the school board has already evaluated several potential sites at the high school. Discussing the possibilities at school board meetings brought out some critics, however, including John Tarbet, who lives near the high school. Reached by phone Monday, Mr. Tarbet said he remains opposed to the district’s siting the bus depot directly on Long Lane, which was one of the sites discussed. “Any type of commercial building there would be out of place,” he said. With regard to a bond referendum, Mr. Tarbet said he was “less concerned about the financial aspect than the aesthetic aspect” of the project.