Highland voting on $1.5 M garage

By DAVID HULSE

ELDRED, NY — Following a tumultuous August 31 public hearing, Town of Highland officials were waiting to see what the voters would say about a proposed $1.5 million bond when they voted on September 9.

The bond issue, to fund a new highway department garage and an attached bus garage space that would be rented year-to-year by the Eldred Central School (ECS) District, would be the largest such municipal project that the town has ever undertaken.

Some residents responded to the June town board decision by raising petitions to force the permissive referendum vote.

Residents questioned the cost of the proposal last week, the school district’s inability to enter into a long-term obligation, the town board’s decision not to provide for absentee voting on the proposal and Councilman Bob Burrow’s role in supporting it while serving simultaneously on the ECS Board of Education.

For his part, Burrow has argued that both the town and school district need the facility and that near $30,000 which ECS now spends on a rental garage would pay for more than half of the annual bond repayment costs.

Supervisor Allan Schadt has argued that the town’s increasing tax base would allow the new cost with little impact on property taxes.

But initial July bids on the project came in $900,000 above the project’s bonded budget. Schadt says one reason for the high bids was that Highland let the bids at the wrong time of year and busy contractors did not price their bids prudently.

Faced with higher costs, Schadt argued last month to remove the school district from an authorizing resolution for the bonding, but last week he said that the town board decided to leave ECS in the project for the time being.

Pending voter approval of the bond, the town will be re-bidding a somewhat scaled-down version, but Schadt said that should bids come in high again, the only remaining alternative would be cutting the rental structure from the plan.

That raises another issue as the town already has $99,000 in engineering costs invested in the original plan and Schadt says there may be additional costs to revise it.

Voting is scheduled only at Eldred Town Hall, and polling hours are between noon and 8:00 p.m.

Rescheduled meeting

Due to the Tuesday, September 14 Republican primary election, the town board’s September meeting date has been changed to Monday, September 13 at 7:00 p.m.