School’s expansion a moving target in G’town

Rising costs raise concern of board

The price of expanding Riverdale Elementary has risen so much since winter that it’s possible that even with cutbacks to the design, it will be the only project Germantown Municipal Schools can afford this year.

That fact is raising questions among school board members who have not voted on any of the possible projects and have not discussed the cost-sharing on a $12 million bond sale that Supt. Jason Manuel presented to the city’s Financial Advisory Commission in August. The board is expected Wednesday, for the first time, to take a crack at setting a five-year capital improvement plan, including where $22 million in deferred maintenance fits into the picture.

School board member Ken Hoover is eager for the discussion.

“I look forward to discussing the details of the Riverdale project,” he said. “I also have some serious concerns about the district taking on the debt-service responsibilities.”

While the board has agreed its top priority is expanding Riverdale Elementary, eliminating portables, the price of the expansion since winter has grown from $7 million to close to $12 million. From Aug. 20 to Aug. 31 alone, it jumped nearly $2 million.

“Working with our architects, they try to show you the Cadillac. ‘Whoa, whoa,’ we said. ‘We can only afford the Volkswagen,’” board chairwoman Lisa Parker said last Thursday.

She is in the position of scaling back the expansion she and Manuel described to the city’s Financial Advisory Commission as being made of decorative brick, glass and steel.

She now says the project will be a combination of cinder block with “a little brick.”

“It really has to blend in with the original building and the neighborhood.”

The issue is that site improvements, including relocating electrical lines, adding ball fields and parking, added enough to the cost of the Riverdale expansion that it’s possible the district won’t have the $700,000 architects estimate it will cost to furnish it.