School officials disappointed by the large number of votes against proposal
Mohonasen school officials were sent a strong message when district taxpayers voted down the proposed $43.4 million capital project by a 2-to-1 margin, despite efforts to convey the need for improvements districtwide.
The vote on Tuesday, Dec. 13, derailed plans to make improvements to all of the district’s four schools and construct a new bus garage to replace the current one that school officials consider a safety hazard. There were 1,058 votes against the project and 531 votes supporting the project. Other proposed improvements would have created more space for instruction and updated technology in the classrooms.
The [Board of Education] needs to talk about what their next steps are, said Adrienne Leon, spokeswoman for the district. `We don’t know what is going to happen at the building level with state aid to schools. I think the board and administration want to wait and see what happens.`
Rotterdam residents recently saw their town taxes increase by 3.5 percent during a turbulent Town Board budget vote, and given the poor economy, school officials knew they had a tough vote on their hands.
`We knew this would be a difficult vote, given the economic climate,` said Kathleen Spring, superintendent for the district. `While we are disappointed by the outcome, we believe it is important to give voters an opportunity to consider this proposal and have a say on it.`
Dom Cafarelli, president for the Board of Education, echoed Spring’s disappointment.
`I think all the members of the board plus the administration were holding our breath to see how things were going to pan out that day,` said Cafarelli. `It might have been a bad time of the year for the vote, although we were under pressure to kind of have a vote by the end of the year because of the state aid.`
State aid would have covered 80 percent of the cost, totaling $34.8 million. Out of the remaining funding, $2.5 million would have came out of the district’s capital reserve fund and district taxpayers would have been left covering $6.1 million.
Cafarelli said he wasn’t sure people understood the actual cost of the project, and without state aid, it will be difficult to complete. Currently it is unclear how much state aid would be available if there were another project vote in the future.
`If we have to pay the full shot for that, it is going to be really tough for taxpayers,` he said. `It would have been a lot easier to have that state aid than not to have it.`
He said the average home in the town is assessed at $150,000, which would have lead to a cost of $60 per household. He felt the price on residents, though some are currently burdened, wasn’t an overwhelming amount to bear.
`It is a ridiculously low amount of money,` said Cafarelli. `I really do understand, and I know there are a lot of people on a fixed income and they have had so many tax increases put on them.`
All school projects in the past nine years have passed, he said, so he thought maybe people became complacent and decided not to come out and vote even though they supported the project.
`I think a lot of the parents of the students didn’t come out to vote,` said Cafarelli. `There are a lot of factors that kind of lead to the fact that positive voters didn’t come out.`
Leon said the voter turnout was on par with previous budget or bond votes over the past 10 years, which saw a range between 1,200 to 1,500 voters hitting the polls. Last year’s budget vote had 1,323 in favor and 881 against it, she said.
She said the district tried its best to inform residents about the project and the vote through different avenues, such as sending out newsletters, holding a public forum, posting information on the district’s website and having an infomercial video run on public access.
`We have a lot of channels that we use to communicate,` said Leon.
Voters passed the first phase of the project in 2007, which dealt with infrastructure needs and improvements, such as plumbing and heating. The recent vote addressed the second and final phase of the project, which dealt more with programs and services offered to students.
`Schools have changed a lot since our buildings were built, and there are a lot of programs that have been added,` said Leon. `The board and the administration felt like the spaces that we have aren’t really adequate for the programs that we have now.`
Cafarelli said the board even scaled back its original project plan by around $20 million, because it didn’t want to overburden residents once they found out state aid wouldn’t be around 95 percent.
`The board itself, all seven of us, worked on this project for almost two years, and it is so disappointing to see such a resounding negative vote for all the time we have put into it,` said Cafarelli. `We did what we thought what we had to do and did the things we thought were really important for us to bring the schools to the next level.“
