By Alice Waugh
Although the topic of school building projects in Lincoln has focused on the K-8 Lincoln School in recent years, Minuteman High School is moving ahead with plans to construct a new building of its own on town land—a project that may cost towns more than they thought and is now tangled in a political web.
Officials from the Minuteman School Committee and the school district’s 16 member towns are trying to find a way to get the project approved and make everyone happy—including Lincoln (which wants compensation for being the host community) and at least four towns that want to leave the district entirely.
The Minuteman district owns a 72-acre parcel of land that straddles the Lexington/Lincoln town line. The existing building is in Lexington, but the new building will go on the 47-acre Lincoln portion closer to Mill Street where parking and playing fields are now located.
The Minuteman School Committee (MSC) voted on November 17 to approve a schematic design for the new building and authorize its project manager to submit the design to the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA).
At the same meeting, committee members learned that towns would get less money from the MSBA that they had expected. The original reimbursement rate was up to 44.5 percent of the $144.9 million total cost, but that percentage applies only to “eligible” expenses. Only about $100 million of the project is eligible for that rate, so the effective reimbursement rate for towns is now only 33 percent, said Sharon Antia, Lincoln’s representative on the MSC. The district has not yet informed each member town of its revised share, she added.
The project was also a topic of discussion at the November 14 State of the Town meeting in Lincoln, when Selectman Peter Braun outlined “host-community concerns.” Lincoln does not receive any tax revenue from the property, and the new building will mean that Lincoln will have to pay “some multiple of five figures” annually for fire and police protection, he said.
Providing tax-free land and services “is a major contribution that our town makes to this school, and it’s totally unrecognized in the regional agreement… we feel we would be remiss by not advocating for some change in that,” said Braun, who has been the town’s point person in Minuteman discussions. Lincoln students make up only about 1 percent of Minuteman enrollment, he added.
Building dimensions are an issue
Before the November 17 vote, Minuteman’s design team made several changes to the plan approved by the MSBA in August to keep the 628-student school under its $149.9 million budget. Cost estimators required a $30 million reduction without a deficit in the educational program to meet district goals.
Among the changes: trimming 25,000 square feet from the two-story building and reducing the height of the theatrical fly loft from 70 to 50 feet. (A fly loft is the space behind and above the stage where scenery, drapery, and equipment can be suspended out of the view of the audience and dropped into view during a performance.)
Even at the smaller size, “this would be our biggest building by far in Lincoln,” Braun said. In comparison, the main building of The Commons is about 189,000 square feet and the Smith/Brooks building at the Lincoln School is 140,000 square feet, he said.
The politics of town funding
The Minuteman School Committee has until December 1 to submit the schematic design, and the MSBA is expected to vote on it on January 27, 2016, according to a Minuteman spokesman. The district then has until June 30 to secure local funding.
Getting buy-in from all 16 towns for their shares of the cost will be tricky, however. Over the past couple of years, Minuteman tried to convince towns to amend the regional agreement so that a unanimous vote on funding the school project and some other matters wouldn’t be necessary, but only 10 towns voted to do so.
Four of the towns—Wayland, Sudbury, Boxborough and Dover—want to secede from the district altogether, “and there may be others,” Braun said in a November 20 interview. Any secessions would also require approval from all 16 towns under the current regional agreement.
The district may opt to override the process for obtaining individual funding approvals at Annual Town Meetings this spring and instead call for a one-day popular vote by residents of the 16 towns. In that scenario, a simple majority of the vote total could move the project forward.
“Our view has been so far that we object to that, and we are not alone,” Braun said at the State of the Town. “We think it would be a slap in the face to all the processes we know and love, including our Town Meeting, and would potentially be very divisive.”
Some MSC members want to go a district-wide vote, but Antia does not. “This is a huge commitment for all 16 towns and I don’t want to see it forced on anyone, she said.” The MSC has not yet made a decision on what strategy to pursue for getting district approval.
More possible wrinkles
Another potential scenario has come up as well. One or more of the towns could explicitly reject the project by popular vote within 60 days of expected MSBA’s expected January 27 go-ahead vote, which they may do under state statute. If that happened, the MSC might then decide to impose the one-day district-wide vote.
However, it may not come to a showdown if another idea comes to fruition in time. Boxborough Selectman Vince Amoroso, who is also a member of the MSC, is trying along with a subset of district selectmen to craft a “grand solution” whereby towns that want to secede from the district could do so in expedited fashion, and the remaining towns would then vote to amend the regional agreement and approve the school project funding at Town Meeting without having to resort to a district-wide vote.
Host community benefits
Although Lincoln’s share of the building cost will be relatively small compared to towns that send more students to Minuteman, Braun and others are displeased with the district because of what they see as a lack of good-faith efforts to recognize Lincoln’s status as host community for the new building.
For one thing, Lincoln received verbal assurances earlier in the process that the new building would conform to Lincoln’s zoning bylaws, including a building height restriction of 36 feet or two and a half stories, Braun said. However, even this week’s revised plans calls for a large portion of the building to be at least 40 feet above grade in addition to the 50-foot fly loft.
Lincoln has also been seeking compensation for providing police and fire protection for the new building. “The school said they would be willing to talk about a fee schedule to specify the scope of services and a price list agreed to in advance, but we never got to first base with that,” Braun said. “They basically just totally reneged on that. There was a conceptual understanding [10 months ago], but nothing in writing or even close to that.”
Although Braun has met with Minuteman officials informally in recent months, there have been no formal negotiations since January 2015, he said.
In addition, Lincoln wants the district to compensate the town in some way for the fact that it cannot collect property taxes on Minuteman’s 47 acres of Lincoln land. The potential revenue if were taxable commercial or residential land “is a gargantuan number if you calculate it,” amounting to hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, Braun said. Finally, Lincoln wants to get the regional agreement amended to reduce its share of capital costs for this project and others in the future.
The best outcome for Lincoln would be the “grand solution” proposed by Amoroso, Braun said. “We’re trying to work toward that and I’m negotiating very adamantly on behalf of Lincoln for our interests to be met in a fair way,” he said.