The Española School District took two steps forward and one big step back within the last week in its plans to build a new Alcalde Elementary School.
The School Board and the Rio Arriba County Commission signed Nov. 4 and Monday, respectively, an agreement that would place 24 acres of land the County received from the federal Bureau of Land Management in joint County and District control. They also signed a deal to swap one acre of land on the west side of the Española Middle School on Industrial Park Road for the shared ownership of the 24 acres in Alcalde. The state Finance Board had approved both agreements Sept. 15.
Part of the first agreement includes a yet-to-be-determined deadline for building a school on the Alcalde land before it reverts to County control, District Projects Manager Paul Salas said.
Whether the District will ever meet any deadline for building the new school was placed in further doubt last week.
The state Public Schools Capital Outlay Council, which provides funding for school construction projects, unanimously voted at its most recent meeting Nov. 6 to take back all of the $4.1 million it had allocated in 2005 for the Alcalde project. The District must now re-apply for funding for that project when it has met several Council criteria, including having its audits up to date and passing a bond election to provide local matching funds.
Despite losing millions of dollars from the state and being rebuked several times in the past year for failing to meet audit deadlines, the District is not much closer to building a school than when it first set aside bond money for the project in 2002. Despite this reality, the Board member whose district includes Alcalde was relatively upbeat.
“My feeling is, you know, we can go back in terms of seeking funding from (the Council) and at this time I feel comfortable we have a good working relationship with (the Council),” Board secretary and Alcalde representative Andrew Chavez said.
Several Council members at the meeting blamed the decision on fiscal necessity, though state Public School Facilities Authority Director Bob Gorrell pointed toward the District’s failure to have the project ready for construction. So far, the District is the only one in the state to have lost Council funding for what Gorrell called “stale projects.”
Council Chairwoman Paula Tackett said the Council may be facing up to a $60 million hit depending on whether Governor Bill Richardson signs three bills passed by the state legislature last month to cut the state’s over $600 million budget shortfall. Richardson has until Thursday (11/12) to sign the bills.
David Abbey, who represents the Legislative Finance Committee on the Council, said those three bills, in addition to decreased oil and gas tax revenues, will put the Council into uncharted financial territory.
“These are the tightest times we’ve ever been in,” Abbey said. “We are really at the point where we’ve had an extremely successful program (that is) now in serious jeopardy because it has been seen as a bottomless pit.”
The night before the Council meeting, Gorrell warned Superintendent Janette Archuleta and every Board member but President Leonard Valerio, who did not attend the meeting, about the impending Council decision. He said the Council was set to pull back funding for the project and halt design until the site was more developed and the District passed a bond and got its audits up to date.
“It’s a problem you guys need to work with,” Gorrell said. “When (Council members) say shovel-ready, they really mean that.”
The now-retracted $4.1 million was a 60 percent match the state awarded the District in 2005 for what was supposed to be a roughly $7 million project. Because cost estimates for the school have risen to between $12 and $17 million since then, the Council’s match now would be between $7.2 and $10.2 million.
Alcalde Elementary fourth-grade teacher Rosellen Sinaloa expressed continued frustration with the drawn-out process.
“You do get irate, but there’s really not much you can do,” Sinaloa said.
Mary Romero, whose granddaughter attends Alcalde Elementary, echoed those concerns.
“It’s been such a long process,” Romero said. “These kids really do deserve to have a real school.”
Students have been in portable classrooms since 2004 when engineers declared a state of emergency because of the school’s sinking classrooms and library.
One major hang-up along the way was that the County did not receive the 171 acres in federal land along the east side of State Road 68, of which the 24-acre proposed school site is one part, until 2007. At that point the District began negotiating a land transfer agreement with the County.
“It’s been a lengthy process with the acquisition of the property and meeting all of the boundary criteria and just a whole slew of logistical problems,” Chavez said.
But during its two-year negotiation with the County, the District ran into several of its own problems that caused the Council to put the Alcalde money on hold and eventually withdraw it.
The Council began withholding award money from the District during the 2008-09 school year, telling the District it had to pass a bond election in order to provide its share of the construction cost before receiving new state capital projects funding.
The District has put off going out for a bond issue since voters rejected a $21 million measure in May 2007. The District most recently debated in July going out for a new bond measure this month, but voted unanimously against it in August.
Chavez said the Board has no concrete plans at the present to seek a bond election.
During the Council’s 2009-10 awards cycle this past July, the Council added the District would need to complete three fiscal years of overdue audits before receiving funding.
The District has not completed an audit since fiscal year 2006. The Board, which also maintains fiscal oversight for Cariños Charter School, has repeatedly blamed Cariños for its own failure to finish its audit.
The District has yet to fulfill the bond election and the audit criteria, so, with a statewide budget squeeze going on, the Council needed to make sure the money it did have was going to good use, Gorrell said.
“The taxpayers have given money to the legislature to use, and (the Alcalde money) is just sitting there getting stale,” Gorrell said. “(The Council) wants projects to move forward and money to not just sit there.”
But Gorrell stressed that all was not lost for the project, The school remains a “Phase II” project, meaning it ranks higher than the Council’s regular list of projects to be funded, he said.
“You don’t lose your place in line, and Alcalde is a pretty high priority,” Gorrell said.
Gorrell also said the Council could continue to provide matching funds for design and geotechnical contracts the District has already started.
However, District Projects Manager Paul Salas said that will not happen because Superintendent Janette Archuleta failed to ask the Council for that condition at the Nov. 6 meeting. Instead, the District will have to use about $200,000 in remaining 2002 bond money to finish out existing contracts with Fanning, Bard and Tatum, Salas said.
Archuleta said it was her understanding that the District is still eligible for those matching funds up to construction.
If Archuleta is wrong that constitutes another blow to the $4 million in bond money the District originally earmarked for the Alcalde project. Of that amount, $1.8 million had been used up by April 2007 for geotechnical studies and now-unusable architectural plans for the school. With the additional $200,000 in unfinished contracts, the District will now have only $2 million in bond money from a 2002 tax measure left for the project.
Though the Council has dropped its requirement for consolidating the Alcalde and Velarde Elementary Schools, architects estimate the new Alcalde school will now cost between $12 million and $17 million, meaning the District would have needed to re-apply to the Council for more money, in addition to finishing its audits and passing a bond issue, even if the Council had not retracted the money, Gorrell said. In a grim note to all schools in the state, Gorrell said the Council would most likely not be able to fund any projects the rest of this fiscal year, and possibly not until fiscal year 2011 or 2012, meaning the Alcalde project may not be built for another three years at the earliest.
But for now, Sinaloa said she and her students are bracing for another winter — and probably many more winters — in portable classrooms.
“Having the portables isn’t an easy thing with the winter coming,” Sinaloa said. “You have to take the students outside to get into gym and out of the gym. That’s kind of hard for the kids.”