Post by gatormom on Nov 8, 2007 14:19:39 GMT -6
Indian Prairie mum on potential sites for new Metea Valley High SchoolBy Melissa Jenco | Daily Herald Staff
Published: 11/8/200
Indian Prairie Unit District 204 officials say they remain committed to building their proposed Metea Valley High School with the same amenities available at Neuqua Valley and Waubonsie Valley - without asking taxpayers for any more money.
But doing so likely will require finding a site other than the Brach-Brodie property off Route 59 near 75th Street and Commons Drive in Aurora where the district originally planned to construct the school.
The district, which covers portions of Naperville, Aurora, Plainfield and Bolingbrook, already owns 25 acres at that site. But it was unable to come to an agreement with attorneys for the Brach-Brodie trust on a price for the remaining 55 acres needed for the campus. The two sides went to court in September to let a jury set the final price.
That jury decided the remaining acreage is worth $31 million, which is $17 million more than the district anticipated.
The district hasn't yet slammed the door on acquiring the Brach-Brodie location, but officials say they're now looking at several other possible sites that are large enough to house an 80-acre high school campus.
The Daily Herald recently sat down with Superintendent Stephen Daeschner and school board President Mark Metzger to talk about the alternate sites they are exploring and what will happen next.
Here's an edited version of that conversation:
Q. What is the current status of talks with other property owners?
Daeschner: We're still negotiating. We'd probably be wise to say we're certainly leaning away from Brach-Brodie, looking at at least a couple more sites that we're negotiating with.
Q. How many legitimate sites are there?
Metzger: I'd say there are three.
Q. Are you sharing what they are yet?
Daeschner: Not yet. As you might guess, we don't want them to play off each other.
Q. Is there a disadvantage now that the other property owners know you can't afford the Brach-Brodie site?
Metzger: Well, they joked with us at the beginning and said they'd like $518,000 (an acre, the price the jury set for the Brach-Brodie land).
Daeschner: I think yes, because all of a sudden you see the people we're working with (know) the amount … so you begin to see that as opening salvos and I'm going "what?"
Metzger: So you're trying to level the playing field in any way you can, which is to deprive them of information about each other.
Q. Is the downturn in the housing market working to your advantage in finding the land you need?
Metzger: It's no secret we're talking to Macom (which has offered to sell the district land at 248th Avenue and 95th Street in Naperville) and I think that plays big into that issue, so I think that's a fair statement.
Q. Are the sites you're looking at now on the list you put out during the spring referendum?
Metzger: The ones we're down to now are discussed in the site selection report (which mentions more than a dozen possible sites) that's available on our Web site.
Q. When the board was first talking about possible high school sites before the March 2006 referendum to raise money for the school, it said all of them had flaws. Is that still the case?
Metzger: The way I characterize it is the one we selected (Brach-Brodie) was the least wrong of the available alternatives.
Q. How will you make it right?
Metzger: I don't know if you'll ever make it right. In light of the extraordinarily high price of the Brach-Brodie parcel, what we're now considering is whether that price makes the others less wrong.
Q. Will you still be able to build relatively the same size high school with similar features on the other sites?
Metzger: Yes.
Daeschner: We might mention that the board has some givens. We keep trying to mention those. One is that the public passed a referendum for an amount of money ($124.7 million) and by using the interest and that referendum money we've pretty well pledged to our public we're going to build it within those budget constraints.
Two, we're going to be able to build a comparable high school to the other two. By comparable, that means pools and fields and gyms.
Metzger: And program offerings.
Q. Is there any danger that all of the alternate sites will be too expensive?
Metzger: No.
Q. Do the alternate sites require legal maneuverings similar to those you employed at Brach-Brodie?
Metzger: The two we're speaking to now are willing to negotiate with us. They were not in the past.
Daeschner: You can't get to where we are now through any logic you can understand. The situation all changed with some things we would have never guessed at the time. It's like walking and falling into a ditch. Never anticipated it. The board had no idea any of the stuff we found out lately was even available.
Metzger: Some of it has to do with changes in the situations of the property owners, too.
Q. What is the time frame for choosing a site?
Metzger: The reason this is hard to predict is a lot of the decisions depend on the information a lot of other people have, the site owners for example. They move at their own pace. Some of them jockey for position to try to find out where we are with the others. Most of that is completely out of our control so it makes it extremely hard to pin down what do we project to be the end game of this because it lurches along at its own speed.
The ball doesn't remain long in our court. When we get information we process that information, give staff further directions and we have further communication with the property owners and the process continues.
Q. How much if any consideration was given to buying Brach-Brodie and building a scaled-down Metea on it?
Metzger: The work that the staff did and reported back to us on was such that no matter how we configured the building or what further modifications or changes we wanted to make to it, the only way to get there was to take one of the two large boxes (like a pool and gymnasium) off the building and make other deletions to the building as well.
Published: 11/8/200
Indian Prairie Unit District 204 officials say they remain committed to building their proposed Metea Valley High School with the same amenities available at Neuqua Valley and Waubonsie Valley - without asking taxpayers for any more money.
But doing so likely will require finding a site other than the Brach-Brodie property off Route 59 near 75th Street and Commons Drive in Aurora where the district originally planned to construct the school.
The district, which covers portions of Naperville, Aurora, Plainfield and Bolingbrook, already owns 25 acres at that site. But it was unable to come to an agreement with attorneys for the Brach-Brodie trust on a price for the remaining 55 acres needed for the campus. The two sides went to court in September to let a jury set the final price.
That jury decided the remaining acreage is worth $31 million, which is $17 million more than the district anticipated.
The district hasn't yet slammed the door on acquiring the Brach-Brodie location, but officials say they're now looking at several other possible sites that are large enough to house an 80-acre high school campus.
The Daily Herald recently sat down with Superintendent Stephen Daeschner and school board President Mark Metzger to talk about the alternate sites they are exploring and what will happen next.
Here's an edited version of that conversation:
Q. What is the current status of talks with other property owners?
Daeschner: We're still negotiating. We'd probably be wise to say we're certainly leaning away from Brach-Brodie, looking at at least a couple more sites that we're negotiating with.
Q. How many legitimate sites are there?
Metzger: I'd say there are three.
Q. Are you sharing what they are yet?
Daeschner: Not yet. As you might guess, we don't want them to play off each other.
Q. Is there a disadvantage now that the other property owners know you can't afford the Brach-Brodie site?
Metzger: Well, they joked with us at the beginning and said they'd like $518,000 (an acre, the price the jury set for the Brach-Brodie land).
Daeschner: I think yes, because all of a sudden you see the people we're working with (know) the amount … so you begin to see that as opening salvos and I'm going "what?"
Metzger: So you're trying to level the playing field in any way you can, which is to deprive them of information about each other.
Q. Is the downturn in the housing market working to your advantage in finding the land you need?
Metzger: It's no secret we're talking to Macom (which has offered to sell the district land at 248th Avenue and 95th Street in Naperville) and I think that plays big into that issue, so I think that's a fair statement.
Q. Are the sites you're looking at now on the list you put out during the spring referendum?
Metzger: The ones we're down to now are discussed in the site selection report (which mentions more than a dozen possible sites) that's available on our Web site.
Q. When the board was first talking about possible high school sites before the March 2006 referendum to raise money for the school, it said all of them had flaws. Is that still the case?
Metzger: The way I characterize it is the one we selected (Brach-Brodie) was the least wrong of the available alternatives.
Q. How will you make it right?
Metzger: I don't know if you'll ever make it right. In light of the extraordinarily high price of the Brach-Brodie parcel, what we're now considering is whether that price makes the others less wrong.
Q. Will you still be able to build relatively the same size high school with similar features on the other sites?
Metzger: Yes.
Daeschner: We might mention that the board has some givens. We keep trying to mention those. One is that the public passed a referendum for an amount of money ($124.7 million) and by using the interest and that referendum money we've pretty well pledged to our public we're going to build it within those budget constraints.
Two, we're going to be able to build a comparable high school to the other two. By comparable, that means pools and fields and gyms.
Metzger: And program offerings.
Q. Is there any danger that all of the alternate sites will be too expensive?
Metzger: No.
Q. Do the alternate sites require legal maneuverings similar to those you employed at Brach-Brodie?
Metzger: The two we're speaking to now are willing to negotiate with us. They were not in the past.
Daeschner: You can't get to where we are now through any logic you can understand. The situation all changed with some things we would have never guessed at the time. It's like walking and falling into a ditch. Never anticipated it. The board had no idea any of the stuff we found out lately was even available.
Metzger: Some of it has to do with changes in the situations of the property owners, too.
Q. What is the time frame for choosing a site?
Metzger: The reason this is hard to predict is a lot of the decisions depend on the information a lot of other people have, the site owners for example. They move at their own pace. Some of them jockey for position to try to find out where we are with the others. Most of that is completely out of our control so it makes it extremely hard to pin down what do we project to be the end game of this because it lurches along at its own speed.
The ball doesn't remain long in our court. When we get information we process that information, give staff further directions and we have further communication with the property owners and the process continues.
Q. How much if any consideration was given to buying Brach-Brodie and building a scaled-down Metea on it?
Metzger: The work that the staff did and reported back to us on was such that no matter how we configured the building or what further modifications or changes we wanted to make to it, the only way to get there was to take one of the two large boxes (like a pool and gymnasium) off the building and make other deletions to the building as well.
