Voters Flunk Plan to Expand District Schools-East Hampton board may seek new poll in fall

By 653 to 418, East Hampton School District taxpayers voted down a proposed $90 million bond to expand and improve the district's three public schools.

A new referendum could be presented to the voters as early as this fall, said Raymond Gualtieri, the district superintendent; immediately after the vote was tallied, in fact, a press release from the district called for a referendum in the fall. Six members of the school board promised to bring expansion plans before the voters in the next few months.

"We just have to do it again," Wendy Hall, a school board member, said Tuesday night after the results were announced.

About the same number of people went to the polls as in the school budget vote, which passed by a similar margin on May 17. Board members asked why people who approved the budget voted against the expansion plan, which would have involved building a new middle school, expanding the high school, and renovating the current middle school to be used for fourth and fifth graders and to house district offices.

"This means that some families voted against it," said John Ryan, a member of the school board.

For the first time, voting was held at two locations: the John M. Marshall Elementary School and the high school auditorium. Voters at John Marshall, many of them presumably the parents of elementary school children, whose children would attend the expanded and renovated high school, approved the referendum by four votes.

However, the vote at the high school proved to be much more lopsided, 482-244. Absentee ballots were 34 to 17 against the referendum.

"I knew the result once I heard the numbers from John Marshall," Ms. Hall said.

The expansion would have cost taxpayers an estimated $300 per year. This year East Hampton School District voters are already facing unusually high increases in village, town, and school taxes.

Dr. Gualtieri speculated that uncertainty about whether the Montauk and Springs School Districts would support extended tuition contracts with East Hampton was a bigger issue for voters. Pending state legislation would have allowed East Hampton and the outlying districts that send students to its schools to enter into contracts for the length of the 25-year bonds that would have financed the expansion.

Without the contracts, East Hampton would not be guaranteed revenue from tuition, or even the students to necessitate a large-scale expansion.

"Voters are very leery of spending money on a plan if they think there will be empty classrooms in the future," Dr. Gualtieri said. "That is the one concern that we didn't have an answer for."

The immediate impetus for the referendum is overcrowding at all three schools, as well as several smaller building projects that the school district faces. If the referendum fails again, the school district will have to lease new portable structures in addition to the eight it already leases, to accommodate the students who are now attending school.

Overdue roof repairs on the high school, and the removal of an oil drum on the Long Lane campus were other projects the bond would have paid for. If a fall vote fails, those two undertakings are expected to increase the 2006-7 school budget significantly.

"All of those projects will show up in the May budget," Dr. Gualtieri said.

On Tuesday night, the board decided to set up a special work session on July 5 to start organizing a fall referendum. The board and Dr. Gualtieri said they expected to put up some version of the current plan, which took five years to envision and bring to a vote. However, the plan might be broken down into a series of subprojects, each addressing one or two buildings at a time, in the hope that voters will pass a series of smaller referendums.

"I think that the board is going to consider what to do next; I don't know if they are going to break the plan down into its component parts," Dr. Gualtieri said.

Mrs. Hall, who has been on the board throughout the creation of the expansion plan, said she was unsure of the next step.

"There's no magic number, I don't think that $35 million would have passed," she said."I don't think that you can cut back, though, because everyone wants a comprehensive plan."