Legislative Council Votes Down Hawley Renovation

By John Voket

School officials and engineers designing the proposed Hawley School heating and air conditioning system will likely be heading back to the drawing board. At a special meeting on November 17, the Legislative Council rejected an earlier recommendation by the Board of Finance to fund all but $490,000 of the $5.2 million requested by the school board.

The $5.2 million, which was reduced by $490,000 at a November 14 finance board meeting, still represented a hefty increase from the original $3.3 million that was already budgeted to provide uniform heating and air conditioning controls and equipment at the school, which was originally built in the early 1900s. The modest reduction to the inflated budget that finance board members cut ostensibly represented the amount air conditioning hardware would cost.

That amount was redacted from the plan after finance board members determined that engineers could still install all the necessary infrastructure that would allow air conditioning units to be tied into the system, if approved at a later date.

It was apparently this adjustment to the overall scheme that proved to be the project’s ultimate undoing.

Council chairman Will Rodgers said that he and the other five council members who ultimately killed the project as it was proposed were surprised to learn that the design could apparently be easily “tweaked” to accommodate cooling systems along with new heating equipment and controls.

Mr Rodgers said that during last week’s meeting, councilman Daniel Amaral asked engineers outright if they thought the air conditioning could still be added after the $490,000 budget cut. The answer came back that the full air conditioning system could still be delivered under the adjusted budget.

“I think this proved that the overall plan was bid wrong,” Mr Rodgers said. “I agreed in theory with other members of the council including Dan [Amaral] and Mike Iassogna that it made sense to put the air conditioning in as part of the initial project, but I had increasing doubts as to whether or not we should move the entire project forward under these bids.”

Mr Rodgers said that he decided to reject the funding after Mr Iassogna, who typically is a strong advocate for education initiatives, and who served on a committee that recommended this among several air quality projects in town schools, expressed concerns that the Hawley project needed to be reexamined in conjunction with other recent school board project priorities.

In recent weeks, the Board of Education presented a list of school Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) priorities that included a $41 million high school expansion project that school officials said they hoped could be phased into town bonding initiative beginning as early as next year. But subsequent to the CIP presentation, discussions among school and town officials yielded suggestions that a new high school project might be a better long-term alternative to help accommodate rapid student population increases forecast in the coming years.

During those discussions, School Superintendent Evan Pitkoff clearly indicated a new high school would cost “at least” $100 million, provided it could be built on town-owned property. Other sources have put the cost of a new high school facility accommodating state population estimates of nearly 2,000 students in just eight years at $160 million or higher.

Mr Rodgers admitted he went into last week’s meeting leaning toward supporting the Hawley project, but bigger picture concerns and the handling of budget increases that were anticipated as far back as December of 2004 caused his change of heart.

“I went in inclined to support it, but the proposal ultimately suffered because of [unclear] projections on the high school cost and because off the miscommunication on cost increases at Hawley,” Mr Rodgers said. “[School board member Andrew] Buzzi said he wanted to talk about the high school project, and that he expected to take action on it in six months. But rushing projects makes you react negatively. If Mr Iassogna wants to slow [the process] down, that’s good enough for me.”

Mr Iassogna was unavailable when called for comment by The Bee. He subsequently failed to respond to requests for further comment by press time Wednesday morning.

Mr Rodgers said, in addition, he believed fellow council members resented the fact that school administrators were well aware of cost increases, but chose to keep that information from the school board until debt service for the originally budgeted $3.3 million was approved last June.

“The new budget exceeded the estimate by so much, and [school administrators] sat on that information for so long,” Mr Rodgers said. “And more importantly, increasing the funding now would have violated the spirit of the voters’ directives who approved the $3.3 million last spring.”

First Selectman Herbert Rosenthal concurred.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a higher percentage of increases on any project already approved by the voters,” Mr Rosenthal said. “Clearly Hawley School needs heat and ventilation improvements, but there was no oversight from the Board of Education because they were not equipped with accurate information in the final days of the budget process. That was sad.”

Mr Rosenthal said looking back on the entire process, that he hoped it would be a learning experience for all involved, and that mistakes made would not be repeated.