Trying to Fit A Square Peg in a Round Hole.

Since the election, external (State of RI) and internal (School Committee) decisions have added at least $43mm in local tax burden to South Kingstown.  The bulk of that has come from reactionary votes made by the School Committee.  With another emergency building committee requested Tuesday, advertised on the Friday of a long weekend, we are seeing reaction after reaction in a very compressed time frame.  It is time for the Town Council to step in and correct our course.  It is likely time to start the facility process over, since everything we hear bears no resemblance to the plans developed over 18 months with the input of thousands of community members.  In my opinion, 3 possibilities might accomplish this:

1. Reject the Stage 2 application and start over. The current School Committee clearly has different priorities than the previous one that set the original plan in motion.  Now, they are attempting to adapt their priorities to that original plan, rather than allowing them to become the foundation for a new plan.  While the state funding bonuses might be at risk (though not according to RIDE representatives), adding $43mm in local burden without changing the scope of the project approaches fiduciary negligence.
2. Delay the application until September and use the next months to reconcile priorities. This would allow several months to adapt their priorities, while putting bonus state reimbursement at reduced risk.  Based on recent history, it seems untenable as the reactions of the current body of 7 members are rarely consistent or reconcilable.  But at least delaying allows more vetting, and does not lock the community in to a $75mm mistake.
3. Scale back the entire project to simply cover regular maintenance of buildings that we would have spent anyways. We are required to spend around $1.8mm to $2.5mm each year anyway.  So revise the application to cover about $36mm to $50mm of high priority facility needs (not wants).  Take the extra bonuses available.  Allow the School district to figure out its annual spending problems, and prepare for a point in the future where we can make some of the transformations that were envisioned and enabled in the original plan.

We are creating unnecessary expense by the constant changing of minds.  The contractors will love it as they’ll be able to soak up every dollar of contingency funds made available, and taxpayers will be footing the bill for decades after the current school committee turns over.  As recently as Friday, the Building Committee was presented with new information, and as of this moment the public has yet to see an application.  We are asking too much of the Building Committee to ram through the largest investment in South Kingstown’s modern history.