Picking Through An Opportunity Lost

It shouldn’t be this hard.

Newtown voters demonstrated last April that they are strongly behind an expansion of Newtown High School when they approved a $38.8 million plan by a margin of more than 1,300 votes. The project was on a fast track as the Board of Education pressed to start construction in time to complete the project for the start of school in September 2009, when strains in the already overcrowded school are expected to be acute. The school board rallied supporters to turn back all threats to the plan, including calls by some skeptics for further reviews of scaled-back, less costly expansion alternatives. Proponents of the plan, correctly sensing a growing consensus to approve the original plan, did not want to consider cut-rate alternatives. “Either we do it right, now, or wrong, later,” one proponent wrote in a letter to the editor. The town agreed when it voted on April 22.

There was only one problem. The construction manager and the cost estimating consultant to the Board of Education underestimated the cost of the project by more than $6 million, missing the total of the actual acceptable bids by more than 15 percent — this despite assurances by the school district’s business director at the time that there was “very little guesswork” involved in preparing the estimate. The irony is that with the original $38.8 million appropriation so far off the mark, the delays and cut-rate alternatives the Board of Education was so eager to avoid are now one likely result.

Like many others who backed the original appropriation, we hope townspeople will have a chance to try to salvage much of the current plan with a vote on a supplemental $6 million appropriation. We agree, however, with Middle School PTA President Mary Ann Jacob, who said last week, “If I’m going to sell it, I’m going to have to understand it… We need to get the truth. The Board of Education needs to have a compelling argument.” It is a sentiment we expect the Board of Finance and Legislative Council to share.

At this point, we need to get beyond the frustration and aggravation we feel when a project so popular with the public gets so far off track in such a short period of time. The Board of Education needs to focus quickly on what still may be salvaged from an opportunity lost. First on the salvage list should be the voters’ confidence.