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NHPS Central: Too costly?
From their Meadow Street headquarters, top school administrators have told high school students, literacy and math coaches, security guards and tradesmen to move to new buildings. Is it now the administrators’ turn?
A budget-balancing committee last week recommended that the district make better use of its own “underutilized real estate” to defray costs. It recommended that the district do a “cost-benefit” analysis about leaving Meadow Street, whether that might mean ending a lease for two floors it rents or selling its share for four floors it owns.
The committee also recommended exploring the possibility of building a warehouse near the district’s central kitchen.
Short tens of millions of dollars over the last two years, the school district has moved out of almost every single building where it pays rent: It shut down an inter-district magnet high school in North Haven, it moved an alternative school into an old location, and it scattered its warehoused records and supplies into empty schools.
But central office administrators have stayed put on Meadow Street, where the district leases space for the first-floor registration office and eighth-floor supervisor desks and where it pays a hefty condo fee for four other floors.
At the committee meeting, held this past Monday in a Meadow Street conference room, Sarah Miller, a parent at Columbus Family Academy and an organizer for the watchdog group NHPS Advocates, suggested vacating the district’s headquarters and sending administrators into buildings that the district fully owns.
Altogether, this school year, the district will pay close to $891,000 for 54 Meadow St. That includes $613,000 in condo fees for four floors; $122,000 in operating costs, like maintenance, insurance, utilities, and security; $149,000 in cleaning fees; and $7,000 in taxes.
(The building’s landlord is Gateway Partners, LLC, a Hartford-based property manager that is itself controlled by Lexington Partners, an investment company that provides cash to private-equity firms.)
Currently, the district uses 63,206 square feet for administrative offices in the building, of which it pays rent for 9,206 square feet and owns the other 54,000 square feet as a condominium.
Miller said that could easily be split up among the 128,315 square feet of other district-owned buildings, where no students will be showing up for school this year.
That includes 375 Quinnipiac Ave., the former site for Elm City Montessori that is currently being used to house facility supervisors and park vehicles; 69 Grand Ave., that is currently being used for furniture storage; 21 Wooster Pl., the former site for New Light School that is currently being used for records storage; and 130 Orchard St., the current site for Strong School that will be empty in January 2020, when it becomes the Barack H. Obama Magnet University School in a new $45 million building at 69 Farnham Ave. on Southern Connecticut State University’s campus.
Michael Pinto, the district’s chief operating officer, said that much of that space is currently being used. He said that, if space is needed in one of the schools, the district may be better off building a storage unit of its own.
“For better or worse, we built 40 schools for 21,000 students. We need to be able to support them, and that includes having a place to store things like toilet paper and really mundane stuff. We need to make sure we have sufficient storage,” he said. “We have down-sized over the course of the last several years: 50,000 square feet at Ferry Street. We’re running out of space. If we’re going to do it, we may also have to build some space for facilities to warehouse.”
Daryl Jones: Not just about the condo fees.
At the meeting, some wondered how much money the properties could pull in if they were sold off to developers, maybe for housing.
Daryl Jones, the city’s controller, said that Meadow Street in particular could be valuable for a commercial developer, given its proximity to Union Station. “This property alone is worth millions,” he said. “There’s a bigger economic-development piece here.”
Jones cautioned, though, that the district needed to proceed deliberately. Moving out of Meadow Street, he said, would mean finding a new hub for all the district’s technology that’s currently wired up in the building.
Aside from Central Office, the district’s last remaining lease is for Adult Education at 580 Ella T. Grasso Blvd., a 40,000-square-feet space owned by New Haven Plaza, LLC, where it pays $380,000 in rent, $144,000 in cleaning expenses and $126,000 in taxes each year.