While the possibility of totally renovating or rebuilding Watertown Middle School appeared to be over, some members of the School Building Committee brought up strategies that they said could still allow the project to happen.
The Middle School was a major item on the School Building Committee’s agenda on Sept. 17. The meeting followed the Sept. 9 City Council meeting where City Manager George Proakis told the Council that he would not recommend that Watertown try to rebuild or fully renovate the Middle School. He said that the price tag of around $112 million was too much above the $84.7 million the City had budgeted for the project.
“If you tried at $112 million and you continue to look at the other uncertainties and the other circumstances surrounding what’s going on in the City, I just didn’t see a path forward. And working with the finance team and speaking with the Council President and Vice President about this, it didn’t seem optimistic as a way to be able to do this,” Proakis said. “There are so many uncertainties in our financial system right now. There are so many challenges and turning a switch and committing to $112 million project, which is basically committing to something in the range of probably not $70 million, but $95 million of borrowing on top of where we already are, which would put us probably very high in the statewide list of borrowing and debt service as a percentage of budget.”
Proakis will present his recommendation again to the Council in October during his preliminary budget presentation to see where their priorities are.
Former City Auditor Tom Tracy crunched the numbers and said that he believes Watertown could afford to do the middle school.
“I’m not ready to give up on this. I think we have the ability without impacting the direct services to the citizens in all the other things that we deliver,” Tracy said. “I think we have the money to do this, the additional $25 million — and I’ve actually run it as an additional $30 million. I’ve done a little bit of a debt service spreadsheet, and it’s $2.3 million at the highest year and then it goes down from there.”
Included in his calculations, Tracy said, are the Fiscal Year 2026 budget, the City Manager’s revenue forecast, future debt service, and the amount of money the City is spending on pensions and other post employment benefits (OPEB). The amount budgeted for pension and OPEB have increased form $28.5 million a year to $34.5 million, he noted.
School Building Committee member Lindsay Mosca, the District’s Education Data Analyst, said that she worries that the project will be much more expensive if the City waits 10 to 20 years to do a full renovation or rebuild. Along with the increase in construction materials and cost, the City is currently leasing temporary classrooms during the High School construction, which cost around $25 million to install. The swing space would have to be recreated or the project would have to be done in phases while the school is occupied.
“We’ve seen over four, now, five feasibility studies that phased reno(vation) in construction is really expensive, and is horrible for the educational environment, and so I think about the options if we were to do this 10 to 15 or 20 years down the road, feels really, really expensive, and not great in terms of what options would be left for the Middle School for the City,” Mosca said.
Council Vice President Vincent Piccirilli said he has concerns about the direction of the economy locally and nationally.
“The current economy is has some significant warning signs. We have 10 new lab buildings that have received their special permits, but none of them have actually started construction,” he said. “In fact, most of them probably will never be built. If one or two of them had been under construction, I think we would have had some new growth we could rely on to do it, like we did with the high school. But that’s not happening.”
He added that policies in Washington, D.C., that are “targeting medical research and funding for universities” which directly impact Boston and Cambridge and also trickle through to Watertown.
He added that the true costs could be significantly higher, and worries that bids for the $112 million project could come in at $130 million or $14o million. In addition, Watertown signed an agreement with the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) in 2017 when they provided money to replace windows at the Middle School that they would be used for at least 20 years.
Mosca also asked whether the City would consider going to voters for a Proposition 2 1/2 debt exclusion override that would raise during the period in which the construction bonds are paid off. Watertown was gearing up for an override to pay for about 60 percent of the high school project when it was originally presented, she said, but the fiscal management under former City Manager Michael Driscoll allowed the City paid for the project from the general fund.
“I would be remiss without asking, when we were going to be building the high school MSBA we were geared up for an override vote to pay for it,” she said, adding, “I guess my question is, I’m not fully understanding, I wonder why we’re not having any discussion about that pathway for such an insanely smaller number for the middle school.”
Passing an override would require the City Council putting the override on the ballot, and then a majority of voters approving it. Proakis said that Watertown has only done one small debt exclusion in the 1990s for improvements at the Middle School. His budgeting practices assume that the City would not be seeking an override. He added that override campaigns can impact the community beyond finances.
“I’ve been a part of conversations with my mayor and manager colleagues about some of the challenges and circumstances that go into those elections, those processes, the circumstances that they cause in a community, and some of the difficulties they create, even if they pass,” he said. “Even if a 53 percent majority votes for them, in the experience it has and the challenges it has, between the people who are for it and against it, and the divisions and the challenges that it creates. My recommendation to the Council had always been to try to do everything in our power, from a budgeting perspective, to spare the community of that entire experience.”
The School Building Committee did not take a vote or position on the suggestions. City Council President Mark Sideris, who chairs the School Building Committee said that he will meet with the City’s project managers to continue to look at all options for the Middle School. He added there could be a special School Building Committee meeting focused on the subject.