At the first public workshop to discuss a $64 million capital improvement bond that the East Hampton School District expects to put on the May ballot, the focus was mainly on needs. The focus at the second meeting, on Oct. 15, shifted to wants.
“A lot of it is athletic,” Adam Fine, the district superintendent, told the small audience and those watching on LTV. At the high school, ideas include an additional turf field, turfing the softball field, baseball field bleachers, an athletic facility with an indoor track, and an auxiliary gym. “You would be able to repurpose the fitness center,” he said, and that could allow for cosmetology, electrical, and plumbing labs for career training.
Also on some people’s wish lists: a film or recording studio for the high school’s audiovisual program, lights at the football field, and a pool, which “has been brought up several times.”
Projects on a middle-school list might be a renovated second-floor classroom for English as a new language, a new air-conditioning system, and an improved science lab. At the John M. Marshall Elementary School, the list might include office renovations, new classrooms to make way for an expanded life-skills space “or sensory-type room” for children with special needs, improvements to the acoustics in the gym, which doubles as an auditorium, and a new stage floor.
“Obviously there are no prices next to them” at this point, Mr. Fine said at last week’s meeting. “Turfing, relative to this bond, is not a big-ticket item. Lights are not a big-ticket item. A pool and auxiliary gym are big-ticket items to the tune of around $30 million or possibly more. These are general things for the board to think about, for the community to think about, but they’re exciting.”
As the district begins to retire debt from older bonds over the next few years, it is hoping to replace that debt in kind in order to tackle large improvement projects while keeping taxes at a steady rate, Mr. Fine and Sam Schneider, the assistant superintendent for business, have explained at several meetings over the summer and early fall.
Needed projects that could be covered by the bond include a districtwide lockdown system. At the high school: a concession stand and bathrooms for outdoor athletics, renovation to all systems in the auditorium (at a cost of about $15 million), a new gym floor, new football and baseball scoreboards, and resurfacing the track. At the middle school: basement classroom renovations, replacing brick mortar and painting and scraping soffits, new windows, and replacing all systems in the auditorium. At the elementary school only two projects have been identified so far: new Americans With Disabilities Act-compliant bathrooms and a new kitchen.
“A lot of the money is going to be taken with the needs,” Mr. Schneider said. But, Mr. Fine added, if the community wants something enough and it cannot be part of the $64 million bond, it could be put up at some point as a separate bond. Some of the items on the needs list could also be pulled out of the bond and covered by the district’s repair reserve fund — replacing flooring, for example, or work on the middle school facade.
In May, voters approved the establishment of a repair reserve fund that would allow the district to save up to $7.5 million over time for major repairs. The fund has about $2.7 million in it now. It can be used for things that are “worn, torn, broken, and inoperable,” Mr. Schneider explained at a school board meeting on Tuesday, when, after a hearing, the board approved plans to spend $642,658 from the fund on various repairs.
Of those, at the high school the district will replace specialized printing equipment and repair and replace synchronized clocks, computers, exterior railings, and exterior signs. At the middle school, it will redo the parking lot and sidewalks and replace flooring. Exterior doors at John Marshall will be repaired or replaced, as will a snowplow and athletic trainer car that are both used across the district.
What East Hampton can achieve with $64 million could largely depend on what happens in Albany, where a bill could be reintroduced before the State Legislature requiring public entities in Nassau and Suffolk Counties to “enter into project labor agreements with unionized work forces for any public work they do, which means that with our capital projects or any projects we pay what the state calls prevailing wage,” Mr. Schneider explained last week. “We are getting estimates that that will increase the cost of construction significantly. So that $64 million may be able to buy somewhere around $40 million worth of work on a comparable scale.”
The bill passed in one house of the Legislature and failed in the other, he said, but “we don’t know where that’s going to head in the coming session.”
“We may go to the voters with a plan for our $64 million in spending and voters may choose to approve it . . . and then if this . . . becomes law, we’re going to have to severely constrict what we do in order to meet the budgetary needs. We’ll still be spending $64 million, but we’ll be able to buy much less.”
At the next meeting on the bond — on Nov. 12 at 6 p.m. in the high school library — the board expects to have rough numbers to attach to the projects so far under consideration. “Once we have them, then we can do a ranked choice survey where we can get a better sense of what the community wants,” said Christina DeSanti, a co-vice president of the board.
Few people attended the meeting last week, and no one in the small audience or watching from home suggested other projects. Mr. Fine and board members again underlined how important it is for the public to be part of the brainstorming process. “Email me,” Mr. Fine said. “Nothing is ridiculous.” His email is [email protected].