Guess What? Library Elevator on the Ballot for March

31 Tuesday Dec 2019

Posted by Eve Ogden Schaub in Pawlet Happenings, Uncategorized

Last night the Pawlet Select Board unanimously voted to put the $300,000 Library Elevator Project on the March 3rd ballot for town vote.

Folks, I love the library. Everyone in that room last night loves the library. I have yet to speak to a person who doesn’t love our local library. But this is a project I believe our town cannot afford.

The librarian explained that grant money is being pursued to help fund the project. But we all know that grant money is not assured, and virtually all of the examples she cited are matching grants.

What was most glaring to me about this meeting was what preceded the library discussion. Like at so many Select Board meetings, the head of our Town Road Crew, Keith Mason, gave a lengthy description of the state of our road budget, which is likely to be woefully short this year. He explained that we are not yet halfway through the fiscal year, yet already 65% through our annual allotted road crew funds. In fact there were folks in attendance expressly to complain that their road is virtually impassable. (I also spoke to people who wanted to attend the meeting last night but could not because their road is currently impassable.)

What shocks me is that our Road Crew is put in an impossible position of having to fix and maintain our roads during a difficult winter, without the sufficient resources to do so. We are talking here about maintaining the infrastructure of our town, without which our residents cannot get to work, cannot get to the grocery store, cannot function.

We are a town that can’t afford to keep all its roads open, yet we are proposing to spend over a quarter of a million dollars to create handicapped access to a building that already has ADA compliant handicapped access. To access a basement meeting room when we already have a lovely historic auditorium across the street in the Town Hall with a handicapped accessible elevator.

If it were free? Maybe. But we all know it won’t be free.

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Here are the comments I read last night at the Pawlet Select Board Meeting:

As a longtime fan of the Pawlet Library and as a founding member of the Pawlet Projects Committee, which raised over $250,000 to convert the schoolhouse into the library’s new home back in 2002, as well as a former Library Board member, I would respectfully like to submit the following comment.

For the last year I’ve been attending Select Board meetings and Library Board meetings in hopes of having a complete understanding of the proposed Library elevator project, but in that time I have yet to hear a compelling argument for it.

The first argument I heard is that the Select Board wants this project, and so the library should go along with it in order to maintain a good relationship with the Select Board. But the Select Board seems far from united in their feelings about this proposal. Even if they were unanimous, this by itself would not justify spending $300,000 on a project, if that project does not make sense.

The second argument that I have heard is that it would resolve the problem that falling ice and snow presents for the existing handicapped access ramp. However, for a fraction of the cost of this proposed elevator, the town could add either snow guards or a ramp roof to resolve this.

The third argument I have heard is that the library has a new Strategic Plan that calls for providing places “for people to gather for social activities and community discussions.” But the strategic plan does not call for an elevator to the basement- it calls for meeting spaces. This is something we already have – not only in the library itself, but in other locations around town that may be used by the library and have been- the gym at the Mettawee Community School, the meeting room in the Pawlet Community Church, and the historic auditorium on the second floor of the Pawlet Town Hall. All of these spaces are handicapped accessible, and one of them, the Town Hall auditorium, is only steps away from the library itself.

The fourth argument I’ve heard, only recently- this morning- is that this is an effort to honor Matt Waite. If that is the case, I’m surprised this hasn’t come up in conversations about the project prior to now. I’m also very surprised that no one contacted Kellie Waite to let her know about this plan. Instead, I was the one to tell her about this project, when I called her to ask her what she thought of it.

We’ve already spent well over $12,000 on a misguided project. Are we really going to propose to the voters of Pawlet that we spend time, energy, and hundreds of thousands of dollars on a project that no one seems to love, and no one has asked for?— When there are so many other things Pawlet very much needs? We do need new library front steps. We do need a new town garage. As one Select Board member put it, this proposal seems like using a hand grenade to kill a housefly. It is a bad, heavy-handed solution to a nonexistent problem. It does not belong on the ballot.

“A Sweet Deal” vs “The Right Thing to Do”

06 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by Eve Ogden Schaub in Pawlet Happenings, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

a sweet deal, act 46, Pawlet Rupert Wells merger, school choice in Vermont, the right thing to do

A lot of things happened at the Pawlet-Rupert-Wells merger public forum last Thursday night, but one thing I especially noticed was the way that certain phrases got picked up and reused by commenters on both sides of the school choice versus designation debate.

Three different commenters called the existing system— which designation would seek to replicate under the new Act 46 merger scenario— “a sweet deal.” This gave me pause. What’s so sweet about it? you might ask.

In a nutshell: when we send our kids to middle and high school in Granville and Salem, New York, we are getting a bargain price. Everyone agrees on this. We can educate our kids for roughly $8,000 per student tuition, even though in Vermont the state average clocks in at well above that amount: over $14,000.

So great!- right? But wait… why is New York State’s high school tuition so much lower than Vermont’s? Have they figured out something we don’t know? When I looked it up, I found something fascinating: New York State doesn’t spend less on education. In fact, contrary to what was said at the public forum, Vermont does not spend more on per student education than any other state in the nation. New York does.

I found a Washington Post article which lists the top five highest education spenders per student… Vermont isn’t one of them. But New York is. In fact, as of 2015, New York is the top spender of all.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/06/02/the-states-that-spend-the-most-and-the-least-on-education-in-one-map/

I found lots of information online, varying by year, but all of it pointed to the same thing: New York pays more than any other state:

screen-shot-2016-09-06-at-10-07-40-am

(Graphic source:http://www.governing.com/topics/education/gov-education-funding-states.html#data )

What gives? How can Granville and Salem secondary tuition be so low, when the state average for New York is so high? According to the most recent information I could find, actual Granville tuition per student is: $24,241. Salem is: $23,237.

links- http://www.syracuse.com/schools/index.ssf/2015/05/spending_per_student_nys_school_districts_2015_lookup_compare_any_district_rank.html

http://b5.caspio.com/dp.asp?AppKey=3908300013b754e71e5842a2a35e

Not $8,000.

So when we send our children to New York high schools, who is making up that $15,000 or $16,000 difference? New York State taxpayers, that’s who. As committee advisor Dan French explained to the merger committee at a recent meeting, New York provides “greater support” for education from a state level.

Is it ethical, I wonder, to combat rising education costs by sending our kids to a state that seems to have a worse problem with escalating tuition than we do? And asking them to pay for it?

Even if you the kind of person to say “ethics-schmethics,” consider this: there’s another, more practical concern here, which is the possibility that New York State residents will awake from their slumber to realize that we’ve been riding on the back of their education system courtesy a big fat loophole. And they could raise tuition. We have no guarantee that they won’t. Here’s a thought: what if they charged us what it really costs? By comparison with $23,000- $24,000 tuition, School Choice per pupil tuition waver of $14,000 starts looking downright frugal.

Which brings me to the other phrase I heard more than once from commenters at the meeting. In the absence of having our own secondary school, they said, School Choice is simply “the right thing to do.” As in, “Yes, rising taxes are hard, but we’re a community. We should all pull together and give our children choice in education because it’s the right thing to do.”

So ask yourself: down the line, what would you want to be in a position to tell our community’s children? That we based their education on “a sweet deal” with no long-term guarantees… or on “the right thing to do”?

No matter which side of the debate you find yourself on, I highly encourage you to show up tomorrow night for the merger committee’s vote, Wed. Sept 7th, 7PM at the Wells School.