Opinion: New school transportation facility? Maybe, maybe not

There is no disagreement about the need for a new school bus facility. No one who has visited the century-old facility on Harrison Avenue can disagree with the idea that something — maybe everything — needs to be improved.

However, it isn’t as simple as connecting the dots and going from point A to Point B.

In 2013, several propositions appeared on the school district ballot.
Proposition no. 2 created a reserve fund for transportation, athletic fields, and maintenance/repairs. The funds were to be drawn from unallocated money in the annual school budgets starting with the 2013/2014 budget and going forward. A cap of $10 million was placed on the reserve fund.

The proposition contained specific language that delineated the uses the reserve funds – turf fields, demolition of the existing bus barn, building a new bus barn, to name a few.

Nowhere in the language of proposition 2 did it say the school district could use the reserve fund money to purchase land. And why not? Well, in 2013 the plan was to have the school district voters give the school board the authority to spend a portion of the money accrued from the sale of our Tuthill Lane lands and purchase land off Flanders Road for the purpose of construction a new transportation facility near the Phillips Avenue School. The propositions allowing for this scenario failed to win the support of the voters. And the money made from the sale of property on Tuthill Lane was then put into the reserve fund created by proposition 2.

Since its creation by voters in May of 2103, the reserve fund for transportation, athletic fields and maintenance/repairs has grown to its $10 million maximum funding level. And now along comes a new proposition no.2 for the 2015/2016 fiscal year: the school board wishes to spend $9.5 million for the purchase of property and relocation of the school transportation facility to a site on Edwards Avenue.

There is nothing wrong with this site. It has previously been developed to accommodate large vehicles and with some minor modifications can easily accommodate our large and small school buses.

The issue is that nowhere in any document approved by the school district voters does it allow for the purchase of property. The school board and its administrators do not have permission to spend $3.5 million of the $10 million reserve fund monies to purchase the new transportation facility.

We will be told that the new proposition for the transportation facility that appears on the ballot this year (2015) intends to seek permission to purchase the property. And that could be OK if the original enabling proposition did not contain the specific uses for the reserve fund monies and omit any mention of land purchases. If the district had placed the money made from the sale of school-owned acreage in Aquebogue into another “savings” account, then the new proposition would make sense. As it stands now, the legal ability of the school district to even ask voters for permission to spend $3.5 million to purchase property is questionable.

Adding even more to the confusion is the fact that the 2013 proposition approved by voters allows the school district to spend some of these reserve fund monies on turf fields, artificial or not, making the proposition to secure a $1.8 million bond (borrowing and adding to debt burden) for artificial turf fields unnecessary. Surely, the cost of these artificial turf fields should come out of the 2013 reserve fund and not new debt, however small the new debt may seem.

There still is time to sort out this confusion. Let’s hope the school district will not sweep it under the rug and count on voter apathy to get what they want. Let us hope they will do the right thing and sort out the questions before May 19.

Angela DeVito is a former member and past president of the Riverhead Board of Education. She lives in South Jamesport.