Opinion: A Minority View on Borrowing for the Proposed New Hanlon-Deerfield School

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

By Peter T. Ittig, Ph.D.

The Westwood Finance & Warrant Commission met on September 20 and a majority voted to endorse the override proposal for the Hanlon School project. This will be voted at the Town Meeting scheduled for October 18 and the override election on October 26 at the ballot box. The following minority report is from comments made at the meetings of the Westwood Finance & Warrant Commission and from data provided to the Commission.

This is a very expensive project, much more expensive than our last large school override for the high school and more expensive than all the comparison school projects. It is probably the largest override ever in Westwood. State reimbursement (about 21%) is low in comparison with the high school, due to choices to build such items as a larger gym than the state will cover and such expensive items as a geothermal heating/cooling system (about $3 million) and the need to mitigate the radioactive gas problem on the site (Radon). Property taxes on homes will need to go up to cover this, and those costs will last for 30 years. This is in addition to the 3% tax increase that was approved at the Town Meeting in May. This will be a substantial tax increase that will be a problem for some residents. Also, due to changes in tax rules, this tax increase will no longer be offset by the Federal income tax deduction that previously covered about 20% to 30% of the cost of such increases for most of us. That makes this tax increase much more expensive for most taxpayers.

The table below shows data provided to the Commission for comparison school projects. The total cost is significantly higher for the Hanlon than for all of those comparison projects including those designed for larger numbers of students in Medfield and Ashland, about $10 million higher than the Medfield school. The cost per student is also significantly higher than all but one of the comparison schools. The exception is in Wellesley, which is building a smaller school and is spending about $12 million less.

The impact on property taxes for homes is expected to be between $55 and $72 per $100 thousand assessed value per year, depending on the interest rate obtained for the 30-year bonds used to finance the project.

Project Comparisons

I am particularly concerned about the impact of a large tax increase on our seniors, who are uniquely vulnerable to tax increases.

Large school overrides have sometimes been accompanied by a concession of some sort for seniors. Seniors are about a quarter of the registered voters in Westwood, are sensitive to tax increases, generally don’t have children in the schools and they tend to disproportionately vote at elections of the kind required for an override. There is no concession this time.

At the time of the last large school override, for the high school, the Town offered a concession to seniors in the form of a proposed partial senior tax exemption. This probably helped to get the override passed. That proposed senior exemption was approved by the Finance Commission and by the Town Meeting in 2000. That exemption was never implemented as it was of a type that was not authorized by the legislature until 2006. The state also offered partial state reimbursement for towns adopting that exemption. Westwood has ignored it. There is a citizen sponsored warrant article pending that would attempt to fix this, but the Select Board postponed that article until next year. Due to this history, I favored taking up the school override at the same time as the article on senior exemptions. In my opinion, the senior exemption that was passed in 2000 represents a promise that was not kept.

Also, I am uncomfortable with the justification for this project, and I am particularly uncomfortable with the Planned Obsolescence of the school designs. We were told that the schools are designed to have a useful life of 40 to 50 years. Since we have several schools in Westwood, this means that we can expect to be continually replacing schools on a perpetual rotating cycle. This also means a replacement with an override and a tax increase every few years. For example, we were told that we will soon be asked to approve another override to rebuild the Sheehan School for another $60 million or so.

In my experience, colleges & universities generally do not do this rotating replacement of buildings. College lecture halls are generally not torn down when they need a new furnace or a roof repair or plumbing repairs. This is also true for homes in Westwood. Homeowners generally do not tear down the house when they need a new furnace or a new roof or new windows.

I believe that our schools should be built to last and the only good reason to build a new school should be for necessary additional capacity. That appears to not be the issue here. In fact, we will be left with a surplus school at Deerfield after this project is complete.

For all of these reasons, I voted no on this article and I recommend that Westwood voters vote no on the override.

Finally, I would like to remind voters that the override election at the ballot box is on Tuesday October 26. This is the week after the Town Meeting and a week before the general election day in November. A mail ballot may be requested from the Town Clerk.

Thanks to Professor Peter T. Ittig, member of the Westwood Finance & Warrant Commission, for contributing this opinion article to Westwood Minute.

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To read Westwood Minute's reporting on this and related subjects, click the links to the stories below:

- FinCom Approves Article for Borrowing $84.6 million for New Hanlon School Building Project (Updated 9/23/2021)

- How WPS and Area School Districts Compare with State, Each Other, in Newly Released MCAS Student Test Results (Updated)

- How Students Can Ace Tests - Part 4