By Alice Waugh
School officials are still waiting for a response to their request from the state for more time to achieve enough “yes” votes to allow the school building project to go forward.
At a meeting of three town panels on December 5, Superintendent of Schools Becky McFall said she had spoken by phone to representatives of the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) and gotten “verbal approval of additional time to work with the community” until at least the end of February.
McFall’s phone conversation was a follow-up to a November 15 letter in which McFall and Glass outlined the reasons for the failed Town Meeting vote on November 3 and asked for more time to achieve resident buy-in before the state-funding window of opportunity closes. The MSBA had committed to providing $20.9 million of the $49 million that would be needed for major renovations and additions to the school, but only if voters approved the project by a two-thirds majority at town meeting and a simple majority at the polls on Election Day (see Lincoln Squirrel, Nov. 19).
“My sense is they [the MSBA] are willing to work with us,” McFall said at the December 5 meeting of the Planning Board, School Committee and School Building Committee (SBC). However, as of December 11, Glass said there had still not been a formal written response from the MSBA.
Though McFall said MSBA officials had not been specific about what they would require from Lincoln to keep the current project alive, “I have not gotten a sense they they’re being hard-nosed at all,” she said. She said she believed the MSBA would probably want to know by the end of February if the town was planning to (a) abandon the project for now and reapply with a new design for state funding sometime in the future, (b) ask for another continuance, or (c) present a revised plan for consideration by the MSBA.
McFall said she expected that the reply letter from the MSBA would include some examples of what measures the town could take while still maintaining the scope of the project already approved by the MSBA.
The big question, she said, is “at what point is it considered a new project,” which would involve going back to the drawing board with the strong possibility that the state reimbursement and overall borrowing climate will not be as favorable the second time around. “They really would not answer that” in the phone conversation, McFall said.
About 60 residents attended the December 5 meeting that was held to review the objections voiced at Town Meeting and discuss next steps. Several people reiterated concerns about the lack of a completed 25-year master plan, which would look at long-term capital spending needs for the town as a whole. There was also much discussion of the process for town-wide two-way communication about the project with residents but no consensus on what that process going forward ought to look like.
Some residents as well as school and town official expressed frustration that the detailed information shared in the past year and a half had not reached or resonated with residents, despite a great deal of effort via public meetings, web and print publications, and various information sessions.
“The [school] site is maxed out. Repair is not viable. We have a favorable borrowing climate. All this has been discussed,” said SBC member Owen Beenhouwer.
Residents who were not present at the early design discussions may not realize that “there’s a reason you [the SBC] made a choice and that you had to make some hard tradeoffs. People don’t understand what those tradeoffs were,” said resident Maggy Pietropaolo.
Many of the “no” votes are “an emotional reaction to a very large [cost] number that no one in town has ever seen before,” said Selectman Peter Braun.
Among the measures officials talked about implementing were a town-wide survey, and more discussion with “town elders” (including some former selectmen and School Committee members) who publicly opposed the project at Town Meeting.
The School Committee and SBC will meet on December 18 to discuss the response from the MSBA that presumably will have arrived before then, Glass said.