Voters to Decide on $1.5M Project for New SAU Offices

When voters come out on Wednesday night for the annual school deliberative session, one of the items on the ballot to discus is a $1.5 million proposal for a new, combined SAU office and special services building.

The proposal is for a 9,800 square-foot building that would replace the 40-year-old green and blue houses that currently serve as space for the school district personnel to conduct business – spaces that school board members, planning and building committee members and even town planning board members call inadequate to serve the district's needs.

According to planning and building committee chairman Rich Hendricks it's a building that has been put off for years in exchange for making necessary upgrades and repairs to the schools. In 2008, replacing these offices was moved to the front of the capital improvement plan, which the two houses have been on for 10 years.

If it wasn't already considered a pressing need, Hurricane Sandy decided to help things along when she blew in and tore the roof off the blue house, the special services building, which is home to the offices for special education administration and more. The lack of a roof during heavy wind and rain exposed the blue house to serious water damage and uncovered other problems to add to known issues like lack of privacy, lack of handicap accessibility and a deteriorating exterior structure.

Following more than a year and a half of investigation, the school district's planning and building committee has come up with a recommendation being supported unanimously by the school board and by a vote of 9-2-0 on the school budget committee to build a free-standing office building to house 18 employees of the blue and green houses and create public conference room space on a parcel of property between Mastricola Elementary School and Merrimack High School.

A State of Disrepair

Currently, Merrimack's Special Services offices are housed in what is referred to as the blue house. It's a 1970s ranch-style home that was never converted into offices inside. It's still very much a three bedroom home with a garage that was converted into a conference room, a kitchen that houses the photo copier and a basement that has become glorified storage after Hurricane Sandy's wrath. The sky could be seen through the ceiling and water was pouring down walls and into light fixtures.

The water ran all the way down into the basement creating significant water damage to walls both inside the walls and on the outer surfaces.

SAU 26 Facilities Director Tom Touseau said water is a constant problem in the basement there, and there's no indication of when you might step down the stairs onto a squishy wet carpet. It can rain for days and the basement stays dry and then rain for an hour and it's wet. While doing repairs after Sandy and replacing carpets, asbestos was uncovered in the basement.

The administration decided it would permanently move the basement staff out of the building following a temporary move for the whole staff of the house during the two-months it took to repair the damage left by Hurricane Sandy. The district's insurance covered the cost of repairs which included a new roof, new ceilings, new walls and carpets among other things.

Over in the SAU Offices in the green house, while they don't have the same amount of water issues in the basement, they do get some water on the floor in the boiler room. The boilers in both buildings are 26 years old, Touseau said and administration is holding out hope that the boilers hold on so as not to have to sink more money into these house.

“There's always that thought of, how much money do we really want to put into these houses,” Touseau said.

Superintendent Marge Chiafery said if the new building is not approved, there are repairs that Touseau can make to existing issues, but it comes around to what absolutely has to be done versus what could be done.

Like the blue house, the green house is a '70s-era ranch that was never converted to office space.

Close Quarters and Lack of Privacy

The other primary issue with both houses is lack of space, privacy and convenience.

During a tour of the buildings on Monday, Chiafery pointed to things like lack of conference space in the green house, thin walls and cramped quarters. If she's holding a disciplinary meeting in her office, it's too cramped to fit herself, a student, the parents and the school principal instead, she'll find space elsewhere at a school, but in the meantime is pushing someone else out of that space for a period of time.

The “conference room” in the green house is the kitchen. It has a small square table with three chairs and sits adjacent to the front office where the administrative assistants are trying to do work. If someone is in a conference, Chiafery said, it blocks off the kitchen, where people eat, where the copying machine sits and it can be a distraction to personnel.

“We always, always, make do, and the staff here is very professional, but the fact is, it's just a distraction,” Chiafery said.

Touseau said they added a vestibule to the front office to cut down on the rush of cold air that would greet the administrative assistants working there, since guests enter right into their work space.

The three offices upstairs, located in three bedrooms, and the three administrative assistants make up only half the house. Down in the basement are a six more employees with cubicles in the main room and three offices around them.

There is no handicap accessibility in to the basement, and has thankfully not been a problem, Chiafery said. The basement also has a couple cramped storage spaces, room for the district's servers and a finger printing station for new employees.

Chiafery said they haven't had an issue getting staff downstairs for fingerprinting but if they had a handicapped staff member, they wouldn't be able to get down the steep stairs and fingerprinting these days is done electronically, so it's not the most mobile of set ups.

Chiafery said she has always felt it is more important to put the education of the district's children first, but there are some very real problems at both of these houses that need to be addressed.

“The people in these offices have solid relationships, they can work well together in tight quarters,” Chiafery said. “The staff have really made the most of a somewhat difficult situation. Customer service is number one here, and they do that really well.”

She said the inefficient space is equally as difficult as the repairs that should be made to the houses.

“The house is a great house, but it was never designed to be an office,” Chiafery said.

The Proposal

The proposed office new building is 8,800 square feet on the main level with a basement area that will be used for extra storage, Hendricks said.

It provides office space for the 12 employees in the SAU office, the four in the special services building , the transportation coordinator who was moved to the maintenance building when they stopped using the basement level of the blue house after Hurricane Sandy, the director of library and technology services and the network administrator who both currently work in the high school.

Hendricks said the committee looked at every option when it came to studying the best way to create functional and private office and meeting space including moving offices into existing schools and shuffling grade levels around at the upper elementary and middle schools to make it work.

They studied for at least six months the feasibility of a renovation of James Mastricola Upper Elementary School, but the work that needed to be done there was extensive.

Between creating a separate entrance to the building (because you can't have people in and out of a school building all day), the work that would need to be done to bring that part of the school up to ADA standards, to upgrade the power, the Internet, the ventilation and general rehab of the building would have cost about $200,000 more to renovate JMUES than it would to construct a new building, Hendricks said.

“When you build an office like that, it's like a game of Jenga, and also, you've now got part of a school that's no longer part of a school,” Hendricks said.

While enrollments right now are low, Hendricks said there has to be the thought of “what happens when enrollments start to increase?”

“I know it's years away, I get, but if you suddenly have a swing in population you have to spend money to go back to classrooms or you have to build a new school,” Hendricks said.

Merrimack has a lot of room to grow and it's a desirable place to live, Hendricks said. At some point populations are going to increase again.

With the new building, would come a conference room that could be divided into two spaces with a moveable wall. When not being used by district personnel, this would become public meeting space and could house groups like local Scouts. It would have a separate entrance so access wouldn't be granted to district offices when staff wasn't there.

A proposal like this has never been brought to the town before, Hendricks said. A couple of years ago a warrant article to put away money for this project was defeated and Hendricks said people said at the time that it's a project that should be bonded all at once.

Given low bond ratings right now, and an increasing need to move staff out of these houses, Hendricks said it is a good time to get this project on the table.

voted to hold off on a roof replacement project at the high school that would have cost about a million dollars in an effort to balance out the money for this project. Touseau assured the board that the roof at the high school could be put off for a couple of years.

Additionally, the board voted to create a warrant article (see warrant above) to close out three capital reserve funds no longer being used (Article 4) and a second one (Article 5) to move that $67,744 into the district's maintenance and repair fund as a contingency should the new building article fail on April 9.

Hendricks said he hopes the voters will see the value and necessity in this project.

“This has been put off for years and years and years and with cheap price of borrowing money and things getting worse instead of better,” Hendricks said. “The time has come.”