Post by proschool on Nov 8, 2007 21:08:56 GMT -6
Now What? Dist. 204 officials talk about Metea Valley
By Melissa Jenco | Daily Herald StaffContact writerPublished: 11/8/2007 5:51 PM | Updated: 11/8/2007 5:52 PMSend To:
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Metea Valley High School's boundaries and opening date are both up in the air as Indian Prairie Unit District 204 looks at alternate sites on which to build the school.
The district originally planned to begin construction on Metea this past spring on 80 acres known as the Brach-Brodie property off Route 59 near 75th Street and Commons Drive in Aurora.
The school was supposed to be completed in time for the start of the 2009 school year.
Indian Prairie already owns 25 acres at the site, but when the two sides were unable to agree on a price for the remaining 55 acres, the district took the landowner to court to allow a jury to decide on the value of the property. The jury's $31 million verdict was $17 million more than officials say they can afford to pay.
The district hasn't totally closed the door on the Brach-Brodie site, but now leaders say they're also looking at several other sites that are large enough to house a high school campus.
The project's delays and rising costs have left some residents wondering why there wasn't a backup plan from the start.
The Daily Herald recently sat down with Superintendent Stephen Daeschner and school board President Mark Metzger to talk about some of the issues surrounding the Metea project.
Here is an edited version of that conversation:
Q. Do all of the alternate sites you're looking at require boundary changes?
Metzger: The non-Brach-Brodie sites would necessitate boundary changes.
Q. The district set the current boundaries in advance of its referendum to fund the school project in part so everyone would know where their children would attend classes before they voted. How will you bring everybody together with new boundaries if you change sites?
Metzger: Part of that is revisiting why we change the boundaries. I don't think our community, on balance, is prepared to accept a building that is substantially different in terms of feature and capabilities from what the other buildings have.
Most believe they would rather see boundaries change and have a full-featured opportunity for their children than to leave the boundaries in place and have less than a fully capable structure available to them.
Q. Are you still on target for a 2009 opening?
Metzger: It depends on which site we pick.
Daeschner: That's becoming a stretch. It depends on how soon we can fulfill negotiations. We could make it, but every day we lose a little bit. It takes a minimum of 16 or 17 months to build once you start.
Metzger: If we have a 2009 opening, it's going to be what I call the Plainfield or Oswego delivery model, where we deliver the space we need for freshmen and sophomores and finish the building while the kids are there the first year. In those scenarios it may mean what we call the big boxes -- auditorium, cafeteria, field house, gym -- that one or two of those may be delayed until January, the beginning of second semester.
Q. If you can't open until 2010, what effect will that have on the rest of the schools and their capacity?
Daeschner: It'll impact them. In my estimation we may have to put up some modulars.
Q. Enrollment is not growing as quickly as predicted. Is Metea still needed?
Metzger: Indian Prairie is now the third-largest district in the state. The only district larger than us other than Chicago is Elgin. They have six high schools. Rockford, which we just passed, has five or six high schools for fewer kids than we have. We have two high schools.
Daeschner: Right now we've got 8,100 kids for two high schools. We've got one high school operating at 4,100 kids -- Neuqua and its Gold campus. That's too many kids. All the data will say an efficient high school should not have more than 1,500.
You're not looking at good situations for kids in sports, extracurriculars, in all that stuff.
We have basically two years that we potentially see some numbers down. That's kindergarten and maybe first grade. The rest are up and down and up and down. Even at a conservative estimate, we're going to have 8,900 to 9,300 kids (in high school by 2019) with the kids we already have here and assuming loss. Compared to what we have now, that's 800 more kids.
Metzger: And we have 10 percent of the district that still isn't built from a housing perspective.
Daeschner: It spills down to the middle school. I've got a middle school that is over 1,400 kids approaching 1,500 kids using every available space. So when you look at the kids we have in elementary and middle versus high school, it continues to show, no matter what the numbers from anybody will say, we already have the kids for 8,900 to 9,300 kids. They're already here.
Q. When you were originally looking at the Brach-Brodie property, weren't there other sites that wouldn't have required legal maneuvering?
Metzger: None of the land we have available to us had a willing seller. None of them. Nobody was clamoring to sell us their land so we were looking at a court battle no matter what.
About 12 months after we filed for condemnation on the 25 (Brach-Brodie) acres in 2003, we worked out a settlement agreement with them and we felt we were probably going to end up working on a modified settlement agreement and we'd reach an agreement and move forward and that would be that.
We certainly did not recognize in 2005 that what we would be facing is a seller that would never, even to this day, state a price at which they'd be willing to sell us the land, unlike what they did with the 25 acres. It wasn't anticipated on many levels.
I think we believed that we would see a negotiated result well in advance. When it became apparent that wasn't going to happen well in advance, we pursued a quick-take option to try to head off the issue and see if we could get some negotiations going. And when that failed we said, "Well the trial still looks good. Our advisers are telling us that we should expect a result in acceptable range" and that didn't happen either.
Q. Why wasn't there some kind of backup plan from the start?
Metzger: I hate to play lawyer, but it depends how you define backup plan. If backup plan means a hot-swappable, immediately drop-in and proceed tomorrow plan, I never understood that to be a backup plan. It would have been irresponsible to do it, it would have consumed lots of time, lots of money and kept lots of balls in the air and that costs money.
We had no reason to believe, based on the advice we were given, that we were going to get the sort of result that we did.
From my perspective, there were multiple backup plans in place. In fact, the morning after the verdict we called three landowners. We knew who we would call right away and we did.
Q. Would it have cost more than it's winding up costing right now? You're still going through the same process just a year later.
Metzger: Part of this is stuff that wouldn't have been in play a year ago. You'll understand that better later. But I perceive the cost to be equal to or less than it would have been to keep those balls in the air.
I mean, you're talking about buying options and having multiple engineering plans set and multiple architecture plans set. In fact the more I think about it, I'm convinced the price would have been higher to do that.
Q. Do you have any idea what you've spent so far on the legal process?
Metzger: I haven't asked (Dave Holm, assistant superintendent for business) but I'd be surprised if our costs are over $1 million.
Q. What is the likelihood of the court granting your request for a new trial for the Brach-Brodie property?
Metzger: I can't answer that. You'd have to ask the lawyers.
Q. You are a lawyer.
Metzger: Those motions are rarely granted.
Q. So why bother going through the time and money?
Metzger: Because if everything blows up on every other site, you've got to have the opportunity to have the best chance to make that site affordable and a new trial is the only tool we've got to do that.
I need to make perfectly clear as someone who has a license to practice law, we absolutely, positively did not file this motion solely for the purpose of holding that property up. That would be wrong.
Q. What kind of pressure are you getting from the public about the Metea issue?
Metzger: Not a lot. There's been a fair amount of message traffic in the beginning with people making a case for different approaches to this.
You had some people then who went into a mode where (they asked) "When are you going to hold a big town hall meeting on this?" By the time they started asking that question, I was able to write back to a lot of those people and say here are the 12 to 15 things people have suggested and made a case for. Do you have something to add to that list? Because if you don't, I'm not sure what the purpose of a town hall meeting would be.
What I didn't write and what was in my head was at least part of these people simply want an opportunity to get torches and pitchforks and see if they can scare or bludgeon people into making a decision that they would approve of.
The whole gamut has been laid out there. In terms of overall message volume, I'll tell you that we've seen much higher message volumes on other topics than we've seen on this and I think attendance at meetings bears that out.
Q. Are there any misconceptions you'd like to clear up?
Metzger: From my perspective, I think people have misunderstood that the filing of the motion (for a new trial on the Brach-Brodie property) somehow means it's all guns firing in that direction and that's the direction we're headed. I don't think that's a correct interpretation of the situation in any way, shape or form.
Daeschner: I think this (building Metea) is going to happen. I think this is going to happen with the givens I outlined earlier.
