Bronxville’s Capital Plan
The Bronxville Board of Education has before it a proposed capital improvement plan with a total cost of 10 million. This includes renovations to the auditorium, middle school science labs, and infrastructure related to building maintenance.
None of these projects are new; they have been under consideration for years. They are being advanced now having been on hold pending completion of recovery from the 2007 flood.
What is the need to address these projects now?
Few people see our middle school science rooms, but it has been years since they have been updated to the modern standard we have in the high school. The renovations have been long awaited and will have an immediate impact on the quality of the education experience for the MS students.
As for the auditorium, no one has suggested it does not need extensive renovation. It was last remodeled in the early 1960’s. There has been only minor work since then. The balcony is closed for safety reasons, many seats do not work, much of the rigging is unsafe and unusable, and the sight lines and ability to hear are terrible.
So the question gets down to what scope of renovation is appropriate:
- Should the district merely replace all the seating, patch the holes in the walls put in new rigging, remodel the balcony so it is safe but leave all the other issues which make an auditorium a theater for drama, for music and for public speaking in addition to being an assembly place for students, parents, and the community at large? This alone has a high cost to it and would dramatically decrease seating capacity in keeping with todays codes.
- Should the district make the auditorium a theatrical space worthy of a Broadway musical?
- Or should the district and community advance a project that will allow for an appropriate sized auditorium that can function as well as a theater as it does as the educational space that it is for so many other non-theatrical events?
These are the options posed to the Board and to the Facilities Committee over the past few years. The Facilities Committee, made up of Board members, administration, community members and members of the PTA and Foundation, have been studying this for an extended period and settled on the third option this past fall. With the complete support of the Board, new plans were developed to consider what it would take to make the auditorium an appropriate theatrical, education and assembly space that will serve the community and the school for years to come. Our expanded design team and facilities committee determined that the use of a lobby attached to the auditorium would allow for the appropriate seating capacity, sight lines and audio components in addition to being a welcome education space in its own right. It seems to have resolved the issues that the Facilities Committee had struggled with, and the new plan even satisfied two board members on the Facilities Committee who thought it could not be done.
What about cost and affordability?
Contemplating these financial needs, the Board of Education recommended and the community voted for the creation of a Capital Reserve Fund last year, and we funded that reserve with $2 million dollars intended for these projects.
We are fortunate in Bronxville to approach this project in a rather unique way. With the realization that there are significant costs associated with these projects and it would take years to get a reserve fund to this amount, a dialogue began as to seeking private donations/funding to allow the project to advance from a limited scope to a project that will serve the needs of the students, the district and the community for the long-term future.
Already the Bronxville School Foundation has granted $850,000 toward this project and the PTA has pledged another $400,000. We as a community cannot thank them enough for this generosity and for their hard work as they continue to raise these important private funds. The hope is that $3 million dollars will be raised privately. It is important to understand that these funds are for the project as advanced and are not intended for a scaled back project. They are there to support the schematic design as proposed (see school web site for details).
If we do some quick math we realize that we expect the construction reserve and private contributions to total $5 million dollars. So how shall we raise the other $5 million needed to move forward with our capital plan?
Just two weeks ago, we presented for the first time to the public what a municipal bond for 5 million dollars would look like and how it would impact one’s taxes. It was shown that because of decreasing debt service and historically low interest rates that the impact on a homeowner’s taxes would be approximately $142 per $1 million of assessed property value. And this incremental cost would disappear after 2019.
Next Steps
Although the proposed capital plan has been reviewed and analyzed by the school administration and members of the Board, we recognize the need to communicate with the public about this work. To this end we have scheduled a special meeting for Thursday, May 24th at 7 PM in the multi-purpose room. At that time school officials and our architects, KG&D, will again present an overview of the capital plan. We will once again address the key questions:
- What financial challenges do we foresee in the future, and how do we plan to address them in a tax cap environment?
- What is the incremental tax burden of these projects and what is the best way to finance the plan?
- What is our track record of project management? How can we assure the public that we have adequate controls in place regarding cost and schedule?
- Have we identified ways to reduce costs for both the science labs and the auditorium through value engineering?
We invite the public to participate in this process, and we remind our fellow residents that ultimately we collectively determine how best to proceed through the democratic process, and if the Board so approves, schedule a vote on the funding of this capital plan in the early fall.
