State officials this week gave a thumbs-down to the “L-shaped proposal” for the Lincoln school project, saying it’s different than the one they approved earlier—and therefore it doesn’t qualify for a promised $21 million in state aid for the work.
In a February 27 conference call, Massachusetts School Building Authority officials told Superintendent of Schools Becky McFall and School Committee chairman Jennifer Glass that the L-shaped proposal is a different project because the “sizes, locations and adjacencies” of the rooms are different, meaning the project has a different scope of work from the previously approved project, and also because there is a change in the ratio between new construction and renovation, McFall and Glass wrote in a school district email on Thursday.
After the original project failed to garner a two-thirds majority at Town Meeting in November 2012, the MSBA said that Lincoln could “assess community support and examine how best to proceed.” However, if the town decided that residents preferred a different project, the town would have to submit a new statement of interest, await a second invitation from the MSBA to enter the feasibility study phase, redo the selection process for a designer and owner’s project manager, and produce a feasibility study and schematic designs with little or no financial help from the state—in other words, starting from scratch. This would also mean reapplying for state construction funding with no guarantee that Lincoln would be awarded the same amount ($21 million) as set forth in the original plan.
The MSBA agreed on the conference call that Lincoln needs a school building project and encouraged the town to submit a new statement of interest, McFall said at a School Committee meeting Thursday night. The deadline for filing that document is April 10.
Despite the setback, McFall said Lincoln was not going “back to the end of the line” for state funding because some of the work done as part of the original application process could be repurposed.
“Are we back to submitting a statement of interest? Yes we are. Do we think we’re losing all the value of the work we’ve done? No, I don’t think so,” she said.
“We recognize that we have to do some work before summer to evaluate… what we can retain, what pieces may need some adjustment and what has no value,” said Buck Creel, the school district’s administrator for business and finance. Much of the design and planning work surrounding the renovation portion of the project should remain valid, though site work and demolition plans will have to be substantially revised, he added.
“There are some things that might need some tweaking, but we already have a lot of the work done,” Creel said.
When the conference call turned to the subject of getting state aid for a new feasibility study, “I took it to say there’s a possibility” of that, McFall said, adding that officials will know more when they get the detailed written response from the MSBA, which was expected at the end of this week.
There will be a joint meeting of the School Committee, Finance Committee and Capital Planning Committee on Wednesday, March 6 at 7:30 a.m. in the Hartwell multipurpose room to discuss next steps, which will likely include the process for submitting a new Statement of Interest and subsequent timetable.