City could privatize 1/3 of school buildings
STAMFORD — For more than a year, the city’s director of administration has been working to formulate an ambitious plan that would upend the current model for owning and operating school buildings.
It calls for private owners to construct new school facilities on their land, primarily unused corporate parks, which the city would in turn lease for long terms, said the director, .
“We have to find a better way to build a mousetrap. Our costs to build and maintain schools is double that of the private sector and the impact of that extra cost affects the students and teachers in the schools,” said Handler.
The city owns three million square feet worth of school facilities. Under Handler’s plan, about one third would be vacated in favor of the new, privately constructed schools, which the city would rent under fixed leases for roughly 50 years, or about the lifecycle of a school, Handler said.
In addition to the schools construction, the city would also outsource the maintenance and longterm capital upkeep of the new buildings to the private owner, said Handler.
The seed for such a plan was planted a year ago after the scope of a ferocious mold crisis in Stamford schools became apparent.
Pervasive mold closed Westover Magnet Elementary School last November and the portable classrooms at Newfield Elementary School the month before. Since August 2018, mold has been found in at least half of the district’s 21 public school buildings, posing a significant health and financial challenge for the city.
To pay for moldrelated work in school buildings last year, the city finance board approved a capital projects budget of $50 million, which required doubling the city’s debt limit, and the board is expected to do the same this year to continue paying for school repair costs.
“Given the costs of what it takes to run a government we have to think about options. Repeating the same behavior is not a viable option,” said
Handler, who became embedded in the schools’ infrastructure crisis as one of six members of the Mold Task Force, which formed last October with a mix of city and school staff to oversee the repairs.
The fixed costs of a lease would enable the city to avoid unforeseen capital expenditures of the like needed at Westover and half of the other city schools.
“We have a significant amount of upkeep and replacement that’s been untouched for years so we’re trying to catch up,” said Handler. But with the city’s capital budget and workforce it doesn’t have the capacity to complete the work at the cost and speed needed, he added.
Handler, who ran as a Republican in the 2018 race for governor, also has a firm belief that the private sector is better equipped to construct and maintain schools than the government.
“The private sector can do a better job than we can at half the price. In construction we have requirements the private sector doesn’t,” Handler said of the city.
The city could sideline some of the lengthy approvals processes required for public construction if private corporations were to build schools on their own land, and has brought on an outside law firm to help advise it on longterm leases for schools, Handler said.
“I think the opportunity to do this is now given the low interest rates for construction. Our counterparties could get better rates, which means our rent can be lower,” said Handler,
The lure for private landowners, he said, would be filling empty corporate space and securing longterm tenants. Owners of several corporate parks in the city did not respond to calls for comment.
In Handler’s vision, the schools with the most troubled infrastructure would be the first to be vacated in favor of privatized buildings. The old schools, in turn, could be sold or new schools could be built on the properties to accommodate the city’s growing student population.
Although Handler would not disclose all the potential locations for new schools, or the names of the schools that would be vacated, he did note one property that is under consideration: 800 Long Ridge Road, the old campus of General Electric that left the city in 2018.
Unlike Westover Elementary, which moved into an office building on Elmcroft Road last year, relocated schools wouldn’t simply move into office buildings, but rather in most cases buildings in corporate parks would be demolished to make way for new schools to be built, Handler said.
The scale for the envisioned project is massive. “I think within two years we could redesign four or five schools and bring a million square feet of space that’s in dire need of replacement into a longterm lease for new facilities,” said Handler.
Mayor David Martin spoke more cautiously than Handler about the certainty of the plan, but said he was generally supportive of exploring the idea.
“Stamford’s school system is one of the most crowded systems in the state in terms of capacity utilization and the state is not forthcoming in helping Stamford with its capital needs,” Martin said. “I’m not wedded to any particular specific plan or how to go forward, but on the other hand we have to open our eyes and deal with the situation.”
The plan could be risky; no known one like it has been tested on a large scale in a comparable school system in the country, but given the financial bind in both the city and state coupled with the schools infrastructure crisis, Stamford is in need of creative options.
“The status of the roads, the need to clean the storm drains, it’s one thing after another and we don’t seem to be looking at what’s our past investment strategy,” said Martin. “It’s always patch and run and we fall behind . ... The unwillingness to consider new options is one of the biggest challenges.”
Residents are often fearful of new ideas and will need to be sold on the school privatization plan, which will require community meetings, but not of the usual kind, said Martin.
“The way it’s normally structured is ‘Let’s hear what the public thinks,’ but the public doesn’t know the critical issues,” Martin said, eschewing, “the idea that we’re just going to listen to the public when the public doesn’t know very much.”
“For people to just give their off the cuff reactions and come to meetings is not as helpful as having an understanding of the costs and tradeoffs that need to be made,” said Martin.
“Speaking for the board I think people are generally positive about the prospect because most importantly it means newer facilities for our students and staff,” said Board of Education President Andy George.
George cited overcrowding in the schools and the lack of state funds for school projects as reasons to support the plan, but said he’s considered the city could lose any possibility for state reimbursement if it opts into such an unusual relationship with a private owner.
Despite the plan being spearheaded by Handler, the education board would have to give final approval to occupy a new building and would bear the cost of the lease.