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Mostly Cloudy Taxpayers to decide $312K capital project
Proposition added to Tuesday’s ballot to fix high school roof
Amid what school officials have described as an emergency situation, Malverne school district residents will not only vote on the 2012-13 budget and five school board candidates on Tuesday, but also on a new proposition for a capital project for roof reconstruction at Malverne High School’s gymnasium.
After determining that there was a need to reconstruct the gym’s roof, the Board of Education unanimously passed a resolution at a special meeting on April 24 to add a proposition to next week’s ballot. The item will appear as Proposition 2.
If it is approved, the district will be authorized to use up to $312,000 of its capital reserve fund — which was established by voters in May 2009 — to carry out the necessary work.
According to Business Administrator Thomas McDaid, the roof is in need of immediate repair, which would be undertaken at no cost to taxpayers. “In previous years, money was set aside for capital projects,” McDaid explained. “After this is done, we’d be left with more than $600,000 for other capital projects. But any time money is spent out of that reserve, we need voter approval.”
McDaid added that the district would receive reimbursement from the state. “We would get back a percentage of what we spent,” he said, “but at the moment, we’re not sure how much.”
According to Spiro Colaitis, assistant superintendent for district operations, the roof is 25 years old and had a 20-year expected life-span. “We replaced the roof in the entire high school five years ago, except the gym,” Colaitis said. “At that time, it didn’t need replacement. In the ensuing years, we had leaks that started developing. They’ve been more and more frequent, so it was a quick deterioration of the roof.”
Colaitis said that he learned of the roof’s condition on April 23. “This is an emergency,” he said. “We’ve been repairing it throughout the last year. We thought we’d keep repairing it — we’d hang onto it as long as possible to save money for the district. It’s become worse. We had our architect come in immediately.”
