10.13.09  Capital Improvements for Charlotte School are overly expensive

The Charlotte School Board wants a $2.8 million bond for capital improvements of our school, mostly in the ’49 building. Reckoned per square foot, the proposed improvements in this building would cost $170/ft2. This is far in excess of the cost for new school construction, estimated at about $120/ft2 for such a building (http://www.reedconstructiondata.com/). And for this exorbitant cost, the Board offers us only a repair of the “bare necessities.

The Board and its architects have given scant attention to energy efficiency and conservation measures, and they have not even performed an energy analysis to see what measures of this kind would be cost-effective enhancements. Only for the separate $1.6 million bond proposed for a woodchip furnace does the Board give some quantitative cost-benefit analysis. Their own spreadsheets (http://tinyurl.com/yzv6edl) show that this furnace would be a white elephant. The installation and operation of this furnace would be profitable only under wildly speculative assumptions, such as an oil price that increases to more than $16/gal. over the 30-year lifetime of the furnace (for comparison, the actual price currently paid by the school is $2.12/gal.), a drastically lower inflation rate for woodchips than for oil, and an unrealistic final salvage value for the furnace.

The Board claims that by rushing ahead with its overpriced capital-improvement plan we might save a bundle by exploiting interest-free bonds available through the federal stimulus program. This reminds me of a furniture sale: Buy a new bedroom set and save by paying in installments without interest! Charlotters can save even more by demanding that the expenditure for capital improvements be reduced to a reasonable level, below the level of expenditure for new construction. If this can’t be done, then let’s knock the building down and replace it—so we save and get a splendid new school!

Susan Ohanian

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