Passage of school capital spending referendum marks start of infrastructure work

AMENIA — With the $12.5 million capital project spending referendum for Webutuck schools handily voted in on Tuesday, Dec. 6, the long process leading to meeting the school district’s infrastructure needs can begin, said Webutuck Central School District Superintendent Raymond Castellani.

Castellani noted that the turnout and range of votes, with 141 “yes” and 46 “no” votes, was about typical for such referenda.

The superintendent stressed that the upcoming expenditures are strictly for infrastructure and for “needs, not wants.” Those are enumerated below and on several short videos on the district’s home page, www.webutuckschools.org/domain/402.

As to timing of the work, what happens now is that the district’s engineers will “design specs for everything and submit those to New York state for review.” That process normally takes a few months, and Castellani estimated that the next step, requesting and vetting bids for each individual component, finding the “least expensive among the qualified,” could start this summer.

These decisions are undertaken in part by Castellani together with the engineers. In the pre-referendum period, the board used BCA Architects and Engineers of Watertown, New York, which may or may not participate in the next step.

Since all the jobs are physically separated and mutually independent, they can be worked on in the same time period, most likely starting in summer 2024 with work completed by winter 2025.

The needs to be addressed are as follows:

• Roofs on all the schools have overextended their warranties and need to be replaced.

• HVAC systems need updating, both for ventilation to improve indoor air in the age of pandemics and for air conditioning at Webutuck Elementary School. This upgrade will enable the district to offer summer school for those students who are struggling academically.

• An age-appropriate playground will be created at Eugene Brooks Intermediate School (EBIS). Currently, students in grades four through eight have no dedicated space for outdoor activity.

The schools’ five tennis courts, located on the hillside facing the district office on the south side of the high-school/middle-school building, are currently used infrequently and only by the community, since the school does not have tennis instruction or a team. Two of the courts will be replaced by surfaces and equipment suitable for a variety of student sports, including a basketball court.

Concrete and pavement work needs to be done in the high-school area, plus work on parking lots. A standby generator will be installed to protect both technology and the district’s system in general.

“A power outage of two days caused the pipes in our basement to freeze, which could have been prevented if a generator had kept the water running,” the superintendent explained. Thus, having a standby generator will represent future savings over “having to make emergency repairs, whose costs can be astronomical,” Castellani pointed out. He also noted that the school is a community Red Cross shelter in case of disasters; this is yet another reason for maintaining its infrastructure at the highest level of preparedness.

Last year’s leak also involved roof panels that collapsed, and the need for asbestos abatement followed, so that middle- and high-school classes had to revert to remote teaching and learning once again as the situation was brought under control.

Flooring and seating were damaged and will be replaced. That work is expected to be completed by spring 2023, well before the new capital project jobs are started.

Septic work, the scope of which will only be determined in the next few weeks based on testing of the system, is another item for which monies have been set aside.

“. . . We have budgeted . . . for [a] worst-case scenario, which may be a full replacement,” Castellani said. Pending the testing, it may be that only certain parts need to be replaced or repaired. In any case, work on the sanitary system at Webutuck Elementary School needs to go forward.

To the question of how an expenditure of $12.5 million could be considered “budget/debt/tax neutral,” the superintendent responded with an analogy of buying a car on a payment plan to explain how taxes will not be affected by the vote. It can best be thought of simply as trading one debt for another of the same amount.

As to the specifics of the current referendum, the district incurred a debt about 20 years ago in order to complete work on EBIS. That debt has matured and will fall off the rolls, so taking on a new debt with about the same dollar-for-dollar valuation means that no new taxes will have to be assessed to pay for the upcoming work.

Keeping the district’s debt status at the same level also ensures that state aid will not be reduced. In fact, aid from New York state should cover $8.6 million of the $12.5 million. When asked about the effects of inflation, Castellani acknowledged that “$12.5 million doesn’t buy you what it did 20 years ago.”