Hey, let's talk about Burncoat

 I am intentionally posting a stub here, as I am working on this on the train outbound, and my posts go out at 3 PM. Come back for more, between today and tomorrow.

On tomorrow night's Worcester City Council agenda, we have the following: 

First a process note: This is coming from the Department of Public Facilities, not from the Worcester Public Schools. That's because school buildings, in a municipal school district, are built not by the school department (which does have its own section on the City Council agenda) but by the city itself. The school department does not run its own building projects, and the School Committee has very, very little to do with building projects.*

Now I want to remind you of where we are with Worcester's school building projects: since 2011, Worcester has rebuilt North High, South High, and Doherty, three of the four comprehensive high schools in the city. Add in Worcester Tech, which opened in 2006, that's all of the largest high schools in Worcester, in the past twenty years. 

Let's give credit where due: considering that Worcester also opened a new elementary school in there (Nelson Place, which was literally falling down, opened 2017), that is a stunning pace of building new schools. Genuinely, and I say this as someone who watches this, this is a tremendous pace.

And we need one! As has been repeatedly noted in Worcester: with fifty buildings and a state projection that plans for buildings lasting fifty years, Worcester would need to open one new school a year in order to replace buildings at the speed estimated as necessary. And, due to cities having more schools and each school being taken individually, as noted last year in the report from Mass Inc and the WRRB, kids of color, poor kids, and kids whose first language isn't English are disproportiately likely to be in buildings that are older and lack facilities many districts take for granted. 

It is thus disheartening to read, in the memo that starts on page 217 and smells like it probably comes more from the city finance office than the city facilities office--as I sincerely doubt that the Chief of Public Facilities is making recommendations on the use of free cash--the following closing: 

Cities and towns across the Commonwealth have been seeking overrides to simply fund standard annual operations. Through careful financial management and planning, Worcester is not in that situation. But if we do not address the significant impact of the cost of a project with the potential size and scale of Burncoat, we will be. We can anticipate future years of budget cuts and/or double-digit tax increases simply in order to provide a similar, or even reduced, level of service compared to that which we maintain today.  

 Yeah, that really reads like it's coming from Facilities...c'mon, people.

Let's get something straight about those overrides: 

• They are largely in communities that don't have the taxing capacities of Worcester. Many towns don't have businesses, let alone the large corporations that Worcester does.
• Those communities overwhelmingly fund the majority of their school budget, which, in most places, make up the majority of their budgets.
• Those communities are overwhelmingly funding their schools, not at the 'did we or didn't we make it' state mandated minimum, but at some level that approaches the actual needs of the school district. 

When you actually have pressing fiscal needs--and goodness knows Worcester does!--it is beyond tone deaf to tout your "careful financial management." It isn't careful financial management not to support local needs!

And here's the chart that the city doesn't include in this report to the City Council: 

That's excess capacity the city has--and see how it has been increasing--that is within the Prop 2 1/2 limit from the Mass Department of Revenue visualization site. While the city presents this as prudent management, one could also see it as unmet need that the city has had the capacity to meet, year by year. And rather than investing in the community, year by year, the city has done the equivalent of burying this in the ground; it isn't as if that is building interest.

The report does include this chart--using the rebuild of BOTH schools, which is needed, but is also why it is as much as it is--about paying the debt through the city's annual operating budget.

We should, though, consider that in light of this chart from Mass DoR again: 

The share of the budget that we're putting towards debt service has been coming down (yes, even as we're paying off the other high schools). 

I am, frankly, angry that all of this concern over fiscal capacity was nowhere to be found when we suddenly were using local resources to build a ballpark to earn money for those who already have much. When we need funding to meet the needs of local students, a constitutional obligation, suddenly we have scary memos.  

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*which is why both of these sentences in the T&G are wrong: 

If the agency votes to approve the report, it would go back to the School Committee

By January 2028, the School Committee and the School Building Authority would create the project scope and funding agreement so construction can begin in May 2029 after a procurement process.

In the case of the first, it goes back to the building committee; the agreement and the procurement process are run by the city.