Wintergreen School.
Hamden has officially approved the sale of Wintergreen School — and is now tasked with planning exactly how to use the $16 million in proceeds to reinvest in the town while filling some budget holes.
The Legislative Council voted Tuesday night to authorize the sale of the school at 670 Wintergreen Ave., which is currently home to the district’s individualized instructional classrooms for alternative and special education students, to Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES).
Three council members — Justin Farmer, Abdul Osmanu, and Betty Wetmore — voted in opposition.
Now the town just has to dot the i’s and cross the t’s to close the sale and get that money in hand over the next week before the fiscal year runs out.
The council also approved a tenants’ rights measure. (Click here to read a previous story about that.)
The town first asked the Legislative Council to sign off on the Wintergreen deal at the beginning of June. Around the same time, the town discovered there were budget holes they had to fill before the end of the fiscal year, which concludes on June 30.
That created time pressure around the transaction, as the town was depending on the school sale to cover those budget gaps and thereby successfully follow through on a promise to investors to keep their fund balance stocked. (Read more about that in a previous article here, which also provides background and details about the school sale.)
Some council members criticized the administration for failing to negotiate the terms of the deal sooner, which could have allowed the council to collectively discuss its passage earlier than one week before the new fiscal year.
The town and council have talked about using the remaining dollars to support a capital reserve fund to avoid borrowing money for needed town projects in the future — as well as giving some funding to the Board of Education after the council chose to flat fund them this budget season in the face of a three point mill rate hike. However, there is not a set plan yet concerning how to allot the cash.
Farmer: "I wanna make it Jamaican blue sea clear ... we need to know this stuff ahead of time.”
“This is a difficult topic,” Councilwoman Katie Kiely said. “But I don’t think the vote is difficult.”
“I think it’s something that is good for the town, I think that it has been budgeted. I also think that had we had this information sooner there might have been a different outcome.”
Kiely said that certain voices had not been heard through the public input process given the tight timeline, such as representatives of Shepard Glen and Church Street schools, whose survival may be dependent on receiving funds for capital needs and building repairs from the Wintergreen money pot.
“There needs to be two-way dialogue before it becomes time for a vote,” she said.
“I’m glad I’m not the deciding vote,” her colleague Justin Farmer stated. “Because I’m pretty sure I’d still have to vote no.”
Farmer’s decision to vote against the sale, he said, was not “because we don’t need to close the hole in the budget, not because we’re not getting a good price — but because we don’t have a plan.”
“We have some goals. If we’re selling a town asset, something we can’t get back, I want plans.”
Farmer argued that the sale of Wintergreen to ACES represents the first of many expected town assets that will be put up for sale under the new administration. He asserted that it’s important to set a precedent regarding how those decisions are made going forward.
“I wanna make it so clear, I wanna make it crystal clear, I wanna make it Jamaican blue sea clear,” he enumerated, “that we need to know this stuff ahead of time.”
“What I’ve seen in the past is that we go in with goals and good intentions, and then something comes up or we didn’t do the homework or we are late with the paperwork and the cost skyrockets and we don’t have enough money or we didn’t budget enough money to finish the goal.”
“There needs to be discussion and dialogue, not only amongst us as leaders, but also among community members …
“Moving forward, any such projects that come to us where we are not doing that, you can count me as an automatic ‘no’.”
Councilman Cory O’Brien added: “I think we need to make it clear to the town that future discussions are gonna be had about how to best utilize this money and reinvest in our town.
“There is no set plan for this money yet … but there will be upcoming discussions, and feedback is much appreciated.”