Over the past 30+ years, the market value of my home has increased by more than 5x, whereas my property tax bill has gone up by a little more than 2x. This increase in housing value has been driven primarily by our excellent school system. Do I enjoy paying higher taxes? Not really. Do I enjoy and want all the services that the Town provides? Absolutely.
Building any new school will raise everyone’s property taxes, and it’s important to know that Lexington has a Property Tax Relief Program for those who qualify.
What has received less discussion about the Lexington High School building project is this: we will not avoid tax increases by turning down the debt exclusion on Dec. 8.
In fact, if voters say no to the current proposal to build a new high school, it is likely to cost us more. That’s because, with a No vote, we will face the following:
- The loss of $121 million in state reimbursement.
- Tax increases to pay for some $311 million in required repairs and renovations on the existing failing facility.
- Tax increases to pay for an additional investment of hundreds of millions of dollars to construct another building to relieve overcrowding.
- A school which, despite these investments, will still be saddled with educationally subpar classrooms, labs and common spaces, while students in our peer communities enjoy new state-of-the-art high schools.
- An open campus that continues to leave our students and teachers at risk for potential safety and security breaches.
- The escalating costs of construction delays.
Regardless of how one may feel about the timing, the process or the price of the school project, everyone, or almost everyone, agrees we need a new high school.
On Monday, Dec. 8, we will have the opportunity to vote on the current proposal. To my mind, the most financially prudent choice is to vote Yes. Passing the debt exclusion will give us a new school that solves the shortcomings of the current facility and spares us from the greater financial losses of trying to maintain an educationally inadequate and failing set of school buildings.
Please join me in voting YES for this current school project. We can vote in person on Monday, Dec. 8, or we can vote by mail by applying for a mail-in ballot.
Pam Hoffman
Precinct 7 Town Meeting Member
We need a new high school, yes, but not at this obnoxious cost and not this plan, for reasons brought up by many constituents ad nauseum. Town Meeting Members must respect those opinions as well. Respectfully voting NO.
Remodeling/upgrading the Current High school was not seriously considered, that worse the residents money.
But let’s face it our egos need a big beautiful “show school” to impress all the “less fortunate” towns.
Pam:
The “$311 million” (raised from $300 million for reasons nobody ever explained) is pure invention as you can read in #1 of https://lexobserver.org/2025/08/18/letters-to-the-editor-some-facts-about-bloom/.
If Bloom was such a “great” design for the new High School Lexington needs, why does the SBC and the YES campaign need to use any such scare tactics?
Another scare tactic is “The loss of $121 million in state reimbursement” if Bloom is not built: any alternative design like the on-campus, box-based design the Schools’ own 20-15 Master Plan recommended is perfectly acceptable by the MSBA.
The more such scare tactics are bandied about, the more voters should ask themselves “why do they need to scare us like this?”
The answer is: because Bloom is not the new High School Lexington needs.
Costing (per the SBC’s own chart https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u2umuhbcHG43JgRG0Y19BM1lPVDyW2en/view?usp=sharing) $1,293 per square foot, Bloom is 25% MORE expensive than the new Belmont High School. Sized for today’s LHS enrollment, Bloom is too small since Lexington’s population may increase by 48% in just 10 years due to 5,750 new MBTA dwellings.
For these reasons, I will vote NO on December 8, so the SBC finally offers us the more reasonable design recommended by the Schools’ 2015 Master Plan.
The “$311 million” comes from professional cost estimators. The base repair/code upgrade option – simply repairing the current buildings and updating them to code, with no walls moved – was one of the 18 options professionally costed by estimators in April 2024 during the Preliminary Design Program phase last year, at $300 million (see the Preliminary Evaluation of Alternatives in the PDP submission on the project website). The base repair/code upgrade option was professionally estimated a second time in October 2024 as one of the seven options at the Preferred Schematic Report phase, where the estimate rose to $311 million when the estimators had more details on needed updates (see the Final Evaluation of Alternatives in the PSR submission). The PDP and PSR submissions have more info on what the repair work entails.
Separately, the DPF maintains detailed facility condition assessments and replacement cost estimates for all public facilities in Lexington, and they indicate the LHS buildings require about $300 million in repairs in the next decade. Many costly repairs have been deferred in recent years since the Town knew we would be working on a building project for LHS. Most systems at LHS have reached the critical point where repairs cannot be deferred any longer, including upgrades/replacements needed for the roof, windows, doors, HVAC, plumbing, ADA upgrades, electrical, Field House system updates, and more. We already know you don’t believe DPF on the basis that they didn’t complete a recommended repair once (?), but to claim this number is “pure invention” is just not true. I urge everyone to visit the project website, watch the FAQ videos, and view the community presentations to learn more about the facts:
https://www.lhsproject.lexingtonma.org/
Brielle:
I filed a Public Records Request to see the document(s) from “professional cost estimators” supporting it.
Unless the Town hid something from me (did it?), there is none other than the https://drive.google.com/file/d/19rrDjp4oD7edb0awDVgCTao-fJNS3KYc/view?usp=sharing VFA report (its $ amounts add up to $303,507,645 per https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cuudwy6WIHLN2czDNzzdW4ohpou9xOr_/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116971253884586510151&rtpof=true&sd=true) but I explained at #1 in https://lexobserver.org/2025/08/18/letters-to-the-editor-some-facts-about-bloom/ that this VFA report is meaningless since we have not been making the VFA-recommended investments, yet LHS is still operating.
If Bloom is such a great design, why are scare tactics necessary to get voters to support it?
I suppose because many people realize that Bloom costs 25% MORE per square foot than Belmont’s new high school (at $1,293 per square foot per the SBC’s calculations at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u2umuhbcHG43JgRG0Y19BM1lPVDyW2en/view?usp=sharing), and at today’s LHS enrollment, is evidently too small since we will most likely get 5,000+ new MBTA dwellings in Lexington in the next 10 years, which at 1 kid per unit will represent another 1,700 high school students to educate, which Bloom expanded can only accommodate if it operates at 141% capacity, as overcrowded as LHS is today.
I will vote NO on December 8 because I want a new high school in Lexington, but not Bloom which is too expensive and too small while a better design has been ignored.
You asked DPF for repair info and are unsatisfied. You continue to ignore the published project documentation and updates on the project website, like the PDP and PSR submissions to MSBA, which include professional cost estimates of the base repair code upgrade option. If we plan to repair/renovate the current buildings, it will cost $300+ million. And then we’ll still need another building project in addition to that to actually add space, adding years of delay and disruption while construction costs continue to rise. I know you’d rather just post the same argument and old data over and over but other folks may be interested in keeping up with current project info:
https://www.lhsproject.lexingtonma.org/
Brielle:
Nobody is suggesting we should “repair/renovate the current buildings”. We should simply study what the Schools’ own 2015 Master Plan recommended, an on-site, box-based, phased replacement of the whole LHS starting with a multi-story box replacing the LHS foreign languages building, which would add space faster than Bloom can, so that LHS can again offer the electives now unavailable due to overcrowding. The SBC NEVER designed, let alone cost-estimated, this option, a sufficient reason to vote NO on Bloom on December 8.
I know you’d rather ignore the substance of what I and other opponents of Bloom keep asking that the SBC do, because Bloom is too small and too expensive per square foot, and you instead repeat irrelevant untruths like this imaginary $300 million which comes from the VFA-recommended equipment replacements as if we wanted to keep LHS running ad infinitum as now built, which NOBODY wants.
A box-based, phased-in option? No thanks! That sounds like the half-baked approach we were left with in the 90s when we decided to renovate rather than rebuild. Let’s get it right this time with a fist-rate solution before costs go even higher. While it may add to our tax bill, it will enhance the towns appeal which will increase property values, I’m voting yes on Dec 8th.
Thank you for this clear-eyed financial analysis. You’ve identified the crucial point that too many people are missing: a NO vote doesn’t avoid tax increases, it guarantees higher ones.
Your point about property values is critical. Our homes have appreciated precisely because of our school system’s excellence. Allowing our high school infrastructure to deteriorate while neighboring communities modernize is a direct threat to those values.
The fiscally prudent choice is clear: Vote YES on December 8. We get a comprehensive solution that qualifies for state funding, or we pay more for piecemeal fixes that leave fundamental problems unsolved. This isn’t a difficult calculation.