As many of you know, the Act 34 hearing for the High School project closed last Monday. The Board will be asked to vote on the submission of these documents to PDE. While I do not know if anyone will actually make a count of the documents and how many were in favor of or opposed to the project, I do know that there was a ton of material submitted. I will be stopping by the office next week to review what I can.
The close of the Act 34 comment period, as well as a comment made by our Board President last week, got me to thinking. Everyone on the Board has talked to many, many people and heard many, many opinions regarding the high school project and its affordability. The comment that caught my attention on Monday night was the one where it was said that the community is evenly divided on this project. My recollection of emails and phone conversations was much different but without the facts before me at the time, I decided not to comment.
I went back and spent some time this week counting up all the emails the Board has received since January 1, 2010. This count has been double checked with duplicate emails from residents who voiced their opinion multiple times discarded so as not to slant in favor of any one person.
I have put together a spreadsheet and present its results below:
Total/Against/ For
411/ 308/ 103
100%/ 75%/ 25%
I have broken down the list of emails by date and removed the names from the list that I used to verify duplicates.
Quite honestly, one of the reasons I put that white paper together in January was because a Board member told me that the community was evenly split. This has never been the case for this level of spending. The Republican Committee of Mt Lebanon did its own survey that showed 70% against a $114 million spend. This Board member at the time already knew about the RCML survey but chose to believe that the community was still split. My time knocking on doors in each of the past three summers had already convinced me of what these surveys proved. This is why I put out my own proposal for addressing the High School- because I didn't think we had an option on the table that adequately addressed the concerns of the majority of our residents. For me, my focus has become trying to figure out ways to save money on the existing design which is why I mentioned last Monday that we ought to consider moving the Central Office staff away from the high school in order to reduce the total square footage of the project.
I point these numbers out because this is honesty. This is transparency. Truth and transparency are sometimes inconvenient.
Thanks for reading.
James
