$7.1m in Bonded Projects Approved

The Board of Finance Wednesday night approved more than $7 million worth of bonded projects at town and school facilities, but postponed its vote on a $3 million funding request to replace windows at Fairfield Ludlowe High School.

The bonded projects, known as capital improvement projects, fall outside the town's $251.5 million operating budget in the 2010-11 fiscal year. The bonded projects require a final vote by the Representative Town Meeting at 8 p.m. May 24 in Osborn Hill School.

Board of Finance member Robert Stone said today that more information was needed on the Board of Education's request for $3 million to replace windows at Ludlowe High, which opened in 2003 after a $33.6 million renovation.

"It's not that we are for or against it," Stone said of the window-replacement project. "We want to know the scope of the project - if all windows have to be replaced or some have to be replaced...We're really examining what the town spends and the school spends."

Sal Morabito, the school district's manager of construction, security and safety, said today that the project called for all non-thermal windows and glass doors to be replaced and also included installing blinds on windows and abating any asbestos in caulking and glazing on windows that are replaced.

James Lee, who served on the High School Building Committee that oversaw Ludlowe's $33.6 million renovation, said today that town boards set the budget for the renovation before the building committee knew the full scope of what was involved in renovating Ludlowe to reopen it as a high school.

"We were given the budget first and then had to make the scope of work fit and ended up throwing people out of the lifeboat," Lee said. "It wasn't that we didn't want to [replace windows] or that we thought it didn't make sense, it was the budget was fixed first."

Lee said the first priority for the High School Building Committee - which also oversaw at that time renovations at Fairfield Warde High School and construction of Roger Ludlowe Middle School - was life, safety and building codes, followed by work required in the Board of Education's educational specifications. Any work beyond that had a lesser priority, Lee said.

Lee, who also served on the Board of Education, said the High School Building Committee had a pretty good idea of how it was going to spend money allocated for Ludlowe High's renovation, but added, "There's an old saying that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. No renovation budget is going to survive opening up the first wall."

Morabito said the decision on when to replace Ludlowe High's windows was up to town boards and that the school district would provide any information requested by town officials.

Stone said a building committee should oversee the work; whether that would be a new building committee or an existing committee, such as the Town Facilities Commission or Special Projects Standing Building Committee, wasn't clear.

The Board of Finance late Wednesday approved the following projects to be bonded over eight years:

* $250,000 to replace two boilers at the Fairfield Senior Center;

* $250,000 to renovate student bathrooms at Dwight School;

* $200,000 to replace treads and risers in three stairwells at Tomlinson Middle School;

* $180,000 to repair the drainage system at H. Smith Richardson Golf Course's first, eighth, 10th, 15th and 18th holes;

* $100,000 to remove an underground storage tank at Fire Station 1 on Reef Road;

* $90,000 to replace the scale house at the Transfer Station on One Rod Highway;

* $80,000 to install fuel monitoring and flow protection systems at Fire Stations 2 and 5;

* $75,000 to replace the roof at Operation Hope, a 50 Nichols St. homeless shelter and agency that helps the homeless;

* $40,000 to replace the fire alarm system at the Fairfield Senior Center.

The board also decided to bond $5.8 million to repave roads in town, an increase of $2.9 million over the amount approved by the Board of Selectmen.

Paving one mile of road costs about $218,000 and the Department of Public Works' goal is to eventually reach the point where 13.65 miles of roads are paved every year, which would allow all of the 273 miles of roads in town to be repaved once every 20 years.

Chief Fiscal Officer Paul Hiller said today that the extra money approved Wednesday night for road repaving was intended to cover work in more than just the next fiscal year.