Leonard Honeyman Photo
The director of the Common Ground school came to the city’s park board Wednesday seeking, well, common ground.
The Board of Park Commissioners is the landlord of the charter school’s 20-acre Springside Avenue campus in West Rock Park. The lease was up in December and needs to be renegotiated. At its last meeting in November, the parks board proposed a 15-year lease with five $2,000 yearly increases, doubling the school’s yearly rent to $20,000.
The city’s corporation counsel, in the meantime, said the lease should run 10 years, not 15. The increases would still be $2,000 a year for five years until the $20,000 figure is reached, parks Director Robert Levine said.
The reason for the increase: an assessment of the land showed it had doubled in value. The school’s lease bases the rent on the value of the land.
Common Ground Executive Director Melissa Spear (pictured), who has been at the helm of the school since “just after Thanksgiving,” said she understood the need for the increase, but asked the board to keep on open mind about the terms.
“My feeling is that $20,000 is reasonable,” she said, but said the school is still working on its budget. She said she willinform the board if the increase would be a hardship.
After the meeting, she said she is looking at the budget and hopes that “it will be all right. We run a very tight ship, we are very frugal, and it {the increase}would suck up another $10,000 that we could put into programming,” she said..
“It is hard for me to evaluate at this point without going through the budgeting process.”
The school has a total budget of $2 million, of which $1.5 million comes from the state. The rest of the programming costs between $400,000 and $500,000 a year, she said.
Spear also asked that the lease also allow her to increase the student body from the current 150 to 200. Levine and board President David Belowsky said OK.