By Alice Waugh
In the last public information session about the Lincoln School before Town Meeting, officials from severals board and commissions discussed the three different warrant articles that will be presented for a Town Meeting vote on March 28 and at the ballot box on March 30
School Committee chair Jennifer Glass walked everyone through the warrant articles, which she outlined in detail in this letter to the editor in the Lincoln Squirrel. Since the town will almost certainly have to borrow money to finance repairs or renovations, Finance Commission chair Peyton Marshall also commented on the tax and bond-rating implications of various levels of borrowing.
The first thing residents must decide in their vote on Article 30 is whether they support a major repair/renovation project or a repair-only project that will address the school’s facilities needs but would not include educational improvements.
“In either case, we would develop choices and bring them back to the town for the town to choose the type of project it wants to do,” Glass said. “Then we would come back to town to vote for the money to pay for a project. This vote is very important because it sets us off a path to repair or renovation, but this is not an end point—it’s just the start of the decision-making process.”
A comprehensive repair/renovation project that meets all of the school’s facilities and educational needs will be eligible for a state reimbursement of around 40 percent, but even after that grant, the cost to the town will be at least $30 million. The warrant article doesn’t specify a maximum cost because the School Committee hopes residents will at least agree to support the minimum number, which is still substantial, as a way to demonstrate Lincoln’s commitment to the MSBA should the town decide to pursue state funding.
“This requires a sizable contribution from the town, whether we’re with the state on on our own,” Glass said. “It’s designed to demonstrate to the MSBA that Lincoln understands the levels of commitment we’re talking about and is committed to a significant project.”
The final cost to the town will depend largely on whether it receives state funding. In 2012, voters failed to approve by the necessary two-thirds majority a project that would have cost $49 million, although Lincoln’s share would have been $28 million after a grant from the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA). Assuming the town decides to go ahead with a major repair/renovation project, “we will have many long hard debates [afterwards] about what we think is the right number,” Glass said.
If Article 30 passes, residents will then be asked in Article 31 if they want to restart the process of requesting funding from the MSBA for the project. This would involve extra time and effort and would make the entire project start later and cost about 3 percent more than a town-only project, but would ultimately save the town at least $12 million. A “no” vote on this question means the town will instead come up with choices for comprehensive repairs funded exclusively by the town at a cost of anywhere from $30 million to $55 million.
If Article 30 fails, residents will be asked via Article 32 if they would support developing options for a single repair-only project. If this vote fails as well, it means that the School Committee will seek individual repairs every year to be funded through the Capital Planning Committee (CapComm).
A “yes” vote on either Article 30 or Article 32 means residents must also vote in the March 30 election to appropriate up to $750,000 for a feasibility study. Only a simple majority is required to pass any of the warrant articles or ballot questions. The question seeks only a one-time capital exclusion from Proposition 2½ and does not involve borrowing, which would require a two-third majority, Glass said.
A fourth Town Meeting warrant article (Article 33) asks if residents are willing to spend up to $75,000 for a master plan of the school campus for purposes of both as school project and a possible community center. A master plan would address “questions about infrastructure on campus and how to lay out the different uses of the campus in the most efficient way,” said Town Administrator Tim Higgins. A study of existing conditions and available options for things like septic capacity, zoning, traffic/parking patterns and wetlands are “fundamental to the planning of both projects,” he said.
CapComm chair Andy Beard said his group had previously concluded based on the McGuire report that “major repairs are in fact required for the schools to provide their existing levels of service, and nothing I’ve seen in the SBAC report since then makes we believe anything different.” The amounts of money being discussed are “very in line with what we’ve been doing over the past past several years,” he added.
Tax implications
The town is in a position to borrow at the moment because some of the town’s preexisting debt has matured, said Finance Committee chair Peyton Marshall. If none of the school building warrant articles or the campus master plan article were to pass, median tax bills would rise by only 0.8 percent next year, the smallest increase since at least 2000, he said. If the town were to borrow $30 million and also approve the campus master plan expenditure, there would be an increase in median tax bills of 3.9 percent, “which is actually below the average historically,” he added.
“We’re now at a point where the growth in the average tax bill in Lincoln is the lowest among our eight neighboring towns,” Marshall said.
At the State of the Town meeting in November, the Finance Committee offered data on how property tax bills would be affected by borrowing under various interest rates and payback periods as well as bond amounts ranging from $10 million to $50 million. “Everything we looked at before suggests there’s a number we’re going to need to do that looks like a starting point of $30 million” for the town’s share of a school project, Marshall said.
Borrowing $30 million would result in an increase to the media tax bill for fiscal 2015 of $946 to $1,318, according to the State of the Town handout (the median bill is $12,503). A $40 million bond would increase taxes from $1,285 to $1,740, while a $50 million bond would results in a hike of $1,606 to $2,054.
The Finance Committee consulted with its bond advisors about the implications of borrowing up to $50 million. “They said pretty much said that up to that range, we’re likely to maintain our [bond] rating and be able to finance up to that amount,” Marshall said. Borrowing more than $50 million would likely result in higher interest rates and “alter our financial profile,” he added.
The School Committee supports passage of Articles 30 and 31 (and Article 32 as a fallback of Article 30 fails), Glass said. “To be fiscally responsible to the town, we should try for state funding… and we would rather have a more cohesive repair project than year-by-year piecemeal repairs,” she said.
If the town decides to apply for MSBA funding and is rejected, it would proceed immediately with a town-funded project rather than waiting another year and applying again, Glass said.
“We’re at an interesting balance point with the MSBA; you’re not allowed to let your buildings get run down, but if we have to take care of deferred things [without MSBA funding], it would be taking away a number of big reasons why the MSBA found we were eligible the last time,” she said. “We’re kind of at that point where we need to give it our absolute best shot [with the MSBA], but only once, and then we need to take care of things that have been deferred for a long time.”
Previous coverage:
- School architects present final report; warrant articles mulled (January 15, 2015)
- Residents start to narrow down school options (December 8, 2014)