NEW BOARD KILLS $60M PROJECT
District officials unable to say how much halting construction will cost taxpayers
UPPER HANOVER » Voting 5-4 before an auditorium filled with supporters and detractors alike, the Upper Perkiomen School Board killed the project to construct a new middle school for the district into which $8 million of taxpayer money has already been invested.
Three new board members — Melanie Cunningham, Stephen Cunningham and James Glackin, all of whom ran on a platform of stopping the project and were sworn in earlier in the evening — joined with Raeann Hofkin and the reelected Kerry Drake Monday night to provide the votes to pull the plug and cancel the contracts.
Construction on the new middle school, just down the road from the high school on Montgomery Avenue, has already begun and work continued on the site Tuesday morning despite the vote the night before.
The vote came toward the end of a four-hour meeting with about 300 people in the audience and only after 24 of them had come to the microphone to express their opinion — all but a handful supported the continued construction of the new middle school project.
But the vote, and perhaps its result, was foreshadowed when, after the new members had been sworn in, newly elected school board President Kerry Drake announced there was a change to the agenda — that a scheduled presentation on the project would not take place, and that a new agenda had been printed up that changed the key item from a vote on “suspending” the project for 60 days to one terminating all contracts.
By the end of the night, 31 people had spoken, some more than once. A total of four spoke in favor of the board’s course of action.
But those who spoke in the voting booth Nov. 7 likely made the difference with the new majority winning by a comfortable margin of between 350 and 1,000 votes, according to results posted on the Montgomery County election website.
When board member John Farris asked what it would cost to stop construction, Superintendent Alexis McGloin said, “I don’t know the answer to that question.”
Board member Melanie Cunningham, who at the end of the night said many of the supporters of the middle school project were making assumptions about what the new majority intended, said every day construction continues, the number changes.
A motion by board member John Farris to delay the vote was defeated, and pleas by board members Judith Maginnis and Mike W. Elliott failed to change the minds of the board majority.
Some speakers said those opposed to the middle school project had made similar pleas for delays before the vote to award the bids and start construction, both before and after the election, and had been similarly ignored.
The $60 million project has been controversial for more than a year and opposition to the project, primarily because of its cost, has been expressed in multiple public forums.
Several speakers Monday night predicted the district will face multiple lawsuits from a variety of sources, spending even more taxpayer money on matters that do not advance public education.
The current middle school has undergone five renovations since it was constructed in 1947. It was