Public Comment: Elementary School Is The Most Important Capital Expenditure Facing The Town. Is Council Doing Enough To Contain Costs?

The following public comment was offered at the meeting of the Amherst Town Council on April 3, 2023.

In a better and more responsible era we would be here to applaud an official announcement that both Amherst College and the University of Massachusetts/Amherst had agreed to contribute $2 – $5 million dollars each to support the construction of a new Fort River Elementary School to educate the children of their faculty, staff and students.

But that era has yet to arrive, and we here hoping that the Council will vote tonight to commit, in addition to the 95% – 98% likely reimbursable $5 million dollars they have already voted to take from the town’s cash reserves to support the construction of the new Fort River School, an additional, non-reimbursable $5 million dollars to further reduce the future taxpayer impact of the construction of the new Fort River School.

We are fortunate the Fort River School replacement project is a “clean” project. Thanks to the School Building Committee, the project is proposed for the larger and better of the two available sites. The new school can be constructed without disrupting education at the existing Fort River School. And, there is no disruptive curriculum or sibling separation proposals tied to the approval of the new school building.

The voters need to hear two things from our elected leaders before May 2:

1. this school project is the most important capital expenditure facing us, not one of four, five or six equally important projects, but the most important. Close to six hundred students will attend this school, because the law requires parents to educate their children, and the parents of these children are parents who cannot afford to send their children to private elementary schools, or do not have the resources to homeschool or charter-school them. Scores of paid professional educators will staff this school, five days a week during, before, and after the school year, along with countless volunteers. In addition to its legally mandated use, the total annual person-hours spent inside this building dwarfs all other proposed municipal capital building projects combined by orders of magnitude.
   
2. Voters know that talk is cheap. If this is the community’s most important capital project, then, comparable to a down payment from savings to purchase a home or car, we need to see non-reimbursable cash coming out of the reserves built up from overtaxing us in the past to reduce the cost of this school building to us in the future.

Finally, in my opinion, based on sixty years of observing and participating in politics, individual voters facing group spending decisions like this school project do not take the green-eyeshade approach I’ve heard from the Finance Committee. They ask ”How important is it?”; Has everything been done to control costs?; and ”Has everything been done to reduce the financial impact on us? The School Building Committee has answered the second question. A Council vote in favor of taking a non-reimbursable $5 million dollars from reserves to reduce taxpayer impact will answer the first and third.

Vincent O’Connor is a resident of District 1.