The funding is in hand to build a new school.
Now the town must remove the project’s liabilities or it will not be built.
For the past year the Select Board worked diligently to obtain a successful debt exclusion vote to fund a new high school. The vote on December 8 was a decisive YES.
At the same time, however, members of the board openly expressed doubts that the Bloom design would obtain approval to be built from the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA), because the School Building Committee did not adequately explore alternatives to building on recreation land. The state legislature has never approved an Article 97 land swap under the Public Lands Preservation Act without prior EEA approval.
Furthermore Bloom requires that wetlands be removed and replicated elsewhere on campus. This is not allowed under state law if there is a feasible alternative to removing them.
Not only are there feasible alternatives, but this is cause for celebration rather than alarm. The architects of SMMA described how to build a phased-in-place school entirely on campus—one that can be built with no more disruption of education than construction of Bloom will cause—and one that will include all the features of Bloom that students, faculty, and parents are looking forward to.
The School Building Committee declined to ask the architects to develop the plan they suggested for two reasons:
• They believed that building any phased-in-place design whatsoever would be far more disruptive than building Bloom.
• They believed that the design proposal made by SMMA could not be modified to take traffic off Park Drive.
Their fears were unjustified. The proof-in-concept shown alongside Bloom below, and described in a letter to the Select Board and EEA sent on December 12, simply follows the architects’ instructions.
Town Counsel has acknowledged the wetland liability. Neither he nor the Select Board has described a plan for avoiding it. The only solution on the table is this one. And the architects were right—it’s a wonderful one.
So have a look. The window for deciding on an alternate design is narrow.
The LHS project consulting team already went over these issues in a video that Select Board member Joe Pato posted in November. In short: the civil engineers working on the project understand the law and the site conditions, and have plans for mitigating flooding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCb5X7ifptM
Meg, that video is irrelevant. The issue here is not flooding. That will be solved one way or the other.
The town has to deal with wetland law. First, they cannot alter wetlands if there is an alternative, and second, MEPA fears that one particular protected wetland will not survive construction. This opinion was backed up by the town’s Construction Manager at Risk, Turner Construction.
Thank you for your leadership on this issue, Jim.