Nick DeFiesta Photo
Student Odia Kane, at right with Harries, testifies.
After hearing promises that school officials will find a way to lessen the sticker shock, aldermen voted to move ahead with a plan to build an $85.5 million new home for New Haven’s science-themed magnet school.
The unanimous vote came at the end of a hearing at City Hall Tuesday night about plans to build a permanent home for the high-performing, itinerant five-year-old Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS) on land in neighboring West Haven.
The vote came with a request for more information from school officials to support their promises of finding ways to limit the project’s ballooning cost to city taxpayers.
The vote at a joint meeting of the Education and Finance committees came months after aldermen began raising questions about the proposed deal. The budget for the ESUMS project grew from $59.5 million to $85.5 million, $16.1 million of which was to come from city coffers. The proposal now advances to the full Board of Aldermen for final consideration.
A presentation before the committees at City Hall Tuesday night by Superintendent Garth Harries —accompanied by schools official Sue Weisselberg, lobbyist Keith Stover and ESUMS Principal Medria Blue-Ellis — successfully convinced aldermen to back the project despite hesitations over its cost.
The project has been in the works since 2007. The school is designed as a partnership with the University of New Haven and West Haven, which would be allotted 20 percent of slots. As at other magnet schools, New Haven students would receive 65 percent of the 616 seats at ESUMS, which features an emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).
When the ESUMS proposal was first presented on July, one point of controversy concerned ballooning “ineligible” costs, so named because the state won’t reimburse them. The current budget calls on the city to carry $16.1 million of these costs; Weisselberg said the Board of Education is embarking on a strategy to reduce the local share of the project to $6.2 million.
Weisselberg said New Haven’s state legislators, whom she credited with helping to cover over $153 million in initially “ineligible” costs in previous school construction projects, would work to do the same for the ESUMS budget. State legislators can pass a “nonwithstanding” clause in a bill, allowing for state funding, as they have done before. Existing precedents could cover about about $10 million of current ineligible costs for ESUMS, Weisselberg said.
Aldermanic President Jorge Perez stopped Weisselberg to ask if the precedents established are similar enough to ESUMS construction to merit a “nonwithstanding” designation. To move forward with the project, he said, he wants to make sure the city would actually receive state funding, lest New Haven be forced to chalk up the full $16.1 million itself after the new school is constructed.
Dixwell Alderman Jeanette Morrison pressed this point: in the “worst-case scenario,” how would she justify the pricetag to her constituents were this cost-reduction strategy to fail?
Weisselberg responded that while she expects the cost to the city to decrease, the concern voiced by Perez and Morrison was fair. But she argued that aldermen should still support the project despite the risk to the city.
“I’m not gonna sit here right now and tell you we can get all of [the state funding],” Weisselberg said. “To some extent every project is a little bit of a leap of faith … But we’re positioned to be in a very strong negotiating position up in Hartford.”
Harries added that the Board of Education is working with West Haven officials and the University of New Haven to find a way to reduce $1 million in West Haven building permit fees for the project — another point of contention among aldermen. Aldermen have criticized the idea of having to fork over building fees to a separate town government which is supposedly a partner in the project.
Harries argued that failing to approve the purchase would still force the city to shell out money, including more than $8 million it would have to repay for previous ESUMS outlays. In addition, were the project to fall through, the city’s budget would have to grapple with a long-term lease at the swing space ESUMS currently occupies in Hamden as it awaits a permanent home.
To demonstrate ESUMS’ importance to the community, Harries called up a beneficiary of the school to testify before the committee: Odia Kane, a junior at the school. Kane said the school has given her a wealth of academic experience, including taking classes at the University of New Haven. But her schooling had been somewhat “hectic and chaotic” due to having to switch school locations multiple times.
“I’ve been here for five years, and I still haven’t had a building,” Kane told the committee.
Kane’s testimony, and the reassurance from schools officials that the city would likely pay less than the currently budgeted $16.1 million, proved enough for the committee to vote unanimously to move the measure to the full board. Perez also asked for a breakdown of students who attend ESUMS by ward, additional information on the likelihood that ineligible costs would be reduced, and more details on alternative methods to bring costs down.
At the end of the meeting, Morrison said she’d been won over.
“In the next two years we have 1,600 biotech jobs coming to New Haven,” she said. “We have to prepare our students.”