Dispute mars Algonquin expansion
The final touches on Algonquin Regional High School's $60 million expansion are expected to be completed next month, school officials say. Delays to the project caused by blue-spotted salamanders, fruitless searches for buried Native American artifacts, and contractor lawsuits can be forgotten.
Still unsettled, however, is a dispute between Northborough and Southborough over which town should receive $1.5 million in state funding for the project. The towns have asked school officials to decide the question. But school officials, who anticipate receiving the funding soon, say that's a nearly impossible task.
"We feel a little a bit like Solomon," said Northborough-Southborough Regional School Committee chairman Paul Gaffney. "The School Committee cannot work it out on our own."
The dispute stems from the towns citing different sets of rules on how to divvy up money from the Massachusetts School Building Authority. The authority has pledged to cover $33 million of the project's price tag.
Northborough contends state law mandates that it receive the $1.5 million because the town's residents are less affluent than Southborough's. Officials in Southborough want to stick to the agreement between the two towns that governs the school district, which would steer the money to Southborough.
Gaffney said the School Committee is in a bind because it might not have the power to split the money between the two towns. "We can't just pronounce some kind of compromise," he said. "It's not clear that a compromise is supported by anything in the law."
At the same time, if committee members side with either town's position, the other town would probably sue the committee, Gaffney said. "Whatever our decision is, it's likely to end up in court," he said. "We need to make sure we've made a decision that is reasonably defensible and the defense of that decision is not going to cost the district a lot of money."
The best way to avoid litigation, said Gaffney, is for the towns to resume negotiations and reach an agreement. "The School Committee has attorneys who say the parties that need to work this out are the two towns," he said. "It's not illegal for the two towns to agree on anything."
Adding to the committee's quandary is the state's refusal to wade into the dispute. "The state's hands are not tied," Gaffney said. "They're not even providing any guidance."
The building authority's spokeswoman, Carrie Sullivan, said the towns and the regional school board would have to resolve the issue themselves.
The disagreement won't hold up the remaining work on the high school, but it's an unfortunate hiccup at the end of a seven-year process, said School Committee member Shirley Lundberg, who helped oversee the project. "It feels like Murphy's law," the Northborough resident said, citing the maxim that suggests whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.
Workers are now completing the heating and ventilation system and some of the building's security systems, Lundberg said. The school has 1,400 students and can hold a total of 1,600 now that the expansion is open, she said.
Designs for the expansion were drafted in 2001, Lundberg said. The discovery of a threatened species of salamanders, and then concerns that there might have been a Native American settlement on the area, delayed work for a few years.
Then the town became embroiled in legal disputes with its contractor, Eastern Construction, over allegedly shoddy work. The contractor was terminated in 2005. In June, the school district received $2.4 million in a settlement from the firm, she said.
The irony of the dispute over the state funding, Lundberg said, was that as the two towns were deciding how to proceed with the expansion, they flirted with the idea of abandoning the regional school district altogether and building separate high schools. In the end, they decided to work together and produced a state-of-the-art facility.
"They have a great school," Lundberg said. "The towns made the right decision."
