Tuesday, November 3, 2009

A Lone Vote on New High School Land

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Last week the School Board voted to purchase about 100 acres of land for about $10 million (Loudoun Independent) on which to build a High School and, someday, an elementary school. It was an 8-1 vote, and I was the "1." Why?

I don't have any objection to the site itself. Throughout the acquisition process I had two serious concerns that I expressed in closed meetings, so my objection was no surprise to my colleagues and senior staff.

The first objection was with the role of the Board of Supervisors. In the 2.5 years I have been on the Board, I have witnessed the waste of millions of dollars and thousands of staff hours evaluating sites that were ultimately rejected by the Board of Supervisors. The last two rejected sites (Lenah & Wheatland) were put under contract with a process that purported to get BoS buy-in before spending all that time and money, and yet turned out to be wasted when BoS changed their minds. I have maintained ever since that this BoS needs to acquire land for schools from now on just to prevent the repeated waste of LCPS time and money. You can lay the blame where ever you want as to why those acquisitions failed... lay it at the feet of either Board or staff. It doesn't matter. It's still wasted money and I can't continue to support it.

Next, this deal was negotiated with an unprecedented number of parcels and landowners for a school site purchase. Six landowners with eleven parcels were involved. Each was negotiated independently. Now that the contracts are complete, it looks fine but this is a bad precedent and I felt strongly that LCPS should have required the owners to negotiate as a single entity for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that any one landowner could be a holdout that screws up the whole deal late in the process. More practically and immediately, a different $50K deposit was required for each plot of land, instead of for the whole contracts as is generally done. We now have $550 in deposits committed to these contracts, instead of the $50-$100K normally required.

In the future it will be difficult to find single parcels of land, and this kind of multi-party deal will become common. It is important to create a new negotiating format to suit it.

So those were my objections. Let me know your thoughts.
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8 comments:

  1. As usual, your logic is spot on. The tremendous waste I have seen in the past year alone is abborrant. The county employees a very capable staff to evaluate and estimate student populations, school needs and location requirements and yet time and time again their recommendations are ignored or simply tossed out the door. Politics as usual whether it be school location, boundary assignements or the myriad of other issues that have been debated of late. Lets get back to logic and keep the politics out of the schools.
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  2. I can't understand how and why someone with your common sense and apparent lack of political motivation has anything to do with the rest of the school board members.

    I wish that we could have you vote 6 times on all issues but especially on the boundary issue to avoid the railroading of Lansdowne to Tuscorora that DuPree and Reed seem so determined to do.
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  3. How quickly/conveniently people forget that DN35 in Ashburn has already moved 2 times in the last 5 years. If this last go round was approved, that would be 3 TIMES IN 6 YEARS!

    Talk about railroading. The only reason we were up to move again was to keep the feeder system intact. That's a joke. How can you expect to keep student communities together with a feeder system when the people charged with setting the boundaries keep changing them?
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  4. The staff plan moved the fewest kids and kept them together with their classmates from Eagle Ridge to Briar Woods.

    Just because stupid moves have been made in the past, we shouldn't continue them in the future. A rational distribution when we're done no matter who gets moved is the obvious solution.

    It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that moving one community way off in the distance while every other community attends local schools doesn't give us a reasonable distribution of students within the district. Actually, the moves being proposed aren't even within the district at all.

    The Eagle Ridge kids would have had a permanent home with all their friends if we had followed the advise of the expert staff. But then what does the staff know about politics?

    I think this whole process would only feel (somewhat) fair at this point if both Ashburn and Lansdowne made concessions towards the required redistribution of students.

    It sure won't feel right to have a bus load of students from Ashburn coming into Lansdowne to go to Belmont Ridge MS while the high school kids have to get on a bus to fight traffic to Tuscorora.

    Any comments John?
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  5. I guess you haven't seen the next move coming - this was straight from the "expert" planner you mention. All the kids south of Hay Rd will move south.

    So, in the short term, this does move the fewest kids, but long term, it moves FAR more than you think. You are talking 700+ from Ashburn Farm, which means the dominio effect will happen and another 700 kids from Broadlands will move. And that means 700+ kids from Loudoun Estates would have to move. and so on.

    The problem isn't with the communities - although some people are making it that way.

    The problem is with the location of the schools. People keep talking about wanting long term solutions - which is to build a MS and HS in northern Ashburn. The numbers prove they are needed there and not south of the Greenway.

    One other point about the "expert" plan put together. It is not flexible enough to allow rising Juniors to continue at SBHS. They don't have a choice because SBHS will still be overcrowded. The staff's plan creates a situation where kids in the same cul-de-sac will be going to different high schools. Kids that aren't even at SBHS yet will get to go because of older siblings. While kids that have spent two years at SBHS have to move, again.
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  6. Thanks, but the comment space is for your comments, not mine. This thread has gotten off the topic of the post. I'll start a new one for you about the pending Lansdowne/Tuscarora boundary item.
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  7. John,

    Your conscientious objection is well stated. The process is still a broken process and the waist is exorbitant. The good news is that the citizens in Dulles South get a good location for two schools where they serve the students in close proximity rather than a sweetheart deal for defunct developers. I personally am tired of the Barbara Munsey's of the world who keep complaining about delays for political reasons. It was the prior board's repeatedly unsuccessful bids for developer profer schools that really delayed this process. The schools are needed and should have been built three years ago however they were not. Now we have schools in locations that will work at reasonable prices so the money we lost in the process will be made up by the lower prices we ultimately received for the properties and the operating costs that will be saved from having schools closer to the populations they serve.
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  8. Thanks for getting to topic back on track. what concerns me is that your vote "no" was not about the school but about your continued frustration w/ processes. they need to be dealt with separately. it is another example of wasted time if you want to throw a wrench in a good plan to make another point.
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