Narrowsburg school mortgage under water

Building sale discussed

By FRITZ MAYER

LAKE HUNTINGTON, NY — Residents spent $4.8 million dollars to renovate the Narrowsburg School building in 2002 and 2003. Now empty, the building was appraised in August to be worth about $750,000 dollars. The remaining debt on the building is about $3.6 million.

It’s a situation that caused concern for Eileen Falk, a member of the Tusten town board, and she let her disappointment be known to the board and the superintendent at the Sullivan West Central School District board meeting on September 16.

Superintendent Kenneth Hilton responded, “We share your angst. Everyone wished the appraisal had been higher.”

Anna Niemann, president of the board, said that because of various factors, including prevailing wage mandates involved with public works projects, “that the cost to reconstruct a building is higher than what it’s really worth is not unusual.”

Hilton read a report from the facilities needs committee, which recommended that the district sell the school’s 14-acre sports field. Additionally, the committee recommended that the district have an environmental survey of the school performed, and look into fixing a drainage problem on the property. Once those two things are addressed, the board should consider putting the building up for sale.

Board member Noel van Swol said that he is strongly opposed to selling the building at this time. He noted that a week prior to the meeting, officials from Fortuna Energy agreed to pay $5,500 per acre and a 20 percent royalty fee for gas leases for 30,000 acres in counties just to the west of Sullivan County. He said, “This area is little Texas.” He said that gas drilling could bring thousand of workers and the children to the area, and he would not like to see the district sell the school for practically nothing now, then be forced to borrow $1 million to build another elementary school at a later date.

The facility needs committee will take up the matter again at its next meeting on October 27, and the full board will consider the matter after that.

While there may be some disagreement about how to proceed with the Narrowsburg building, there seemed to be general agreement about the other mothballed building at the Delaware Valley Campus. The building is located on a 68-acre parcel. Hilton said, “We recommend to the board that we hold onto the Delaware Valley School at least until we have a sense of where this gas rush is taking us.” The acreage at the school might be valuable for gas drilling.

Hilton said selling the land separate from the school would likely create incompatible uses: meaning, for instance, the building would not be a good site for another kind of learning institution if there were a lot of noise from trucks and drilling rigs nearby.

In other news, the board voted to suspend three cafeteria workers for three weeks without pay over a controversy that sprang from a dispute with a supervisor. At the last meeting, the agenda had resolutions prepared that would have resulted in the firing of the three workers Lois Long, Irene Ward and Bonnie Crum, but the board reportedly reconsidered the matter.

A fourth cafeteria worker, Patricia Giordano, according to a source familiar with the case, was initially offered four months severance pay to leave the school district, but turned down the offer. At the meeting, the board voted to terminate her employment, but she is pursuing the matter through arbitration.