With funding for likely one of the most expensive regional infrastructure projects expected to go before voters in the spring, Island school officials are weighing how voters will ultimately make their decision. In a meeting planned for next month, school committee members may decide whether to ask voters to support funding the nearly $350 million project as a majority vote across the entire Island, or on a town-by-town basis.
Some school officials are pushing for an Island-wide vote because they are worried that one town could sink the project and risk nearly $100 million in support from the state. But town officials say the all-Island option would bypass the traditional town meeting structure, and this late in the game, they feel they are being blindsided.
While town residents would be able to cast their vote either way school officials decide, the magnitude of the decision has not been lost on those behind the project.
“It’s probably the most important vote our school committee can make,” Superintendent of Schools Richie Smith said of the decision this week. “Everybody’s got a stake in this.”
The Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School (MVRHS) building project has been in the works for about a decade, though the next several months are likely the most significant in terms of funding decisions, design plans, and grant applications.
According to officials, the school building is in disrepair, with mold, asbestos, leaks, floods, and outdated mechanical systems among the issues they’re hoping to fix with a renovation and addition. Estimated to cost about $334 million, the capital project would be the most costly in Island history.
This week, the school committee was scheduled to decide how to bring the vote to residents, but members decided to postpone the decision. In an MVRHS meeting on Monday night, committee members cited the misleading wording of the agenda item as their reason for delaying the decision.
Amy Houghton, chair of the school committee, was concerned that it sounded as though members would discuss the way the project was funded instead of how they would structure a vote for town residents. The committee agreed to take the discussion up again in November.
Due to Massachusetts General Law (Chapter 71, Section 16), the All-Island School Committee has the power to veto town government completely, bringing the vote to the taxpayer directly to approve or deny the project by majority. This way would involve polls being opened in each town with residents showing up to vote “yea” or “nay” on the funding of the building project individually, much like the voting system that elects local and national government officials.
The original option — which the committee may decide to veto — is the traditional path, where each town votes in spring town meetings. Some town officials have brought up that this option ensures a wider breadth of voters and resident opinion, and a more middle-ground reach, versus catering to the residents who may be the most motivated to show up to the polls on a single day.
The biggest difference between the two is that the Island-wide vote would pass by majority, and the town meeting would not. Most important to school committee members is their concern that if any towns vote down the project, they could lose state support and a roughly 30 percent reimbursement for the project.
If the funding isn’t passed, towns that rejected the measure would have 60 days to hold a re-vote, according to the guidelines of state funding. After that re-vote, if it doesn’t go through again, the committee would have to reapply for Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) reimbursement funding, with no guarantee it would receive it again, as it applied almost 10 times for acceptance this time around.
“If each town has to vote on it and one town votes no, then the whole project goes down. So that’s a very big concern, because it could kill the whole project. And then I’m not sure what we would do at that point,” Tisbury resident and high school building committee member Sally Rizzo said.
Rizzo watched a similar situation happen just recently with the Tisbury School building project, where they lost state reimbursement funding. Although the circumstances were different, the effect of losing the funding has been an expensive venture for Tisbury residents.
While the choice of how to vote is ultimately up to the school committee, some towns are pushing back. On Tuesday, the Chilmark Select Board took a strong stance against an Island-wide poll.
“This has never happened before … and they want to do it for this huge school,” Chilmark select board chair Marie Larsen said. “It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-plus million … I’m really concerned about this.”
The select board members in Chilmark reached a consensus that they were completely against an all-Island vote at the polls on a single day. Town meetings, they said, are a system that hasn’t been bypassed before — for good reason. They fear that residents who are more middle-ground about issues may not take time out of their day to vote at the polls, and they may miss out on crucial discussion as a result.
Still, select board members clarified that they are in full support of a building project in general. They decided to send a letter outlining their concerns to the school committee.
‘A rock and hard place’
Some of the towns’ general lingering qualms about the school project include the fact that Tisbury and Oak Bluffs would be taking on a significant burden of cost because they have the highest percentage of students enrolled, while having the lowest average income of all Island towns,
Each town on the Island will pay a different amount toward the project, if approved. Those payments will be partly calibrated according to the number of students attending MVRHS from each town, accounting for 70 percent of the population (according to the student census between 2019 and 2023). The remaining 30 percent is based on equalized property values in each town.
Although the formula was decided on and approved by representatives in each town back in 2022 after a regional agreement from the 1950s was revisited in reference to the high school building project, town officials have remained concerned about the structure of it.
“The burden on Tisbury taxpayers is highest,” Tisbury resident and finance committee member Nancy Gilfoy said in a recent presentation to the school committee.
Tisbury is already borrowing a lot of money for big capital projects, and is concerned about taking on responsibility for another one. Its town hall and library need renovations as well, and any projects down the line would be an additional burden. Taxpayers and town officials have felt the strain of their own elementary and middle school building project, which cost nearly $30 million more than estimated after losing MSBA funding.
In a select board meeting on Tuesday night, Gilfoy said while the impact to taxes could be high for the average taxpayer, the high school has serious deficiencies. Her concern for the fairness of funding is complicated by her understanding that the school needs a renovation, badly.
“We are between a rock and a hard place,” she told the Tisbury select board.
Roy Cutrer echoed those sentiments in the meeting on Tuesday. He highlighted that if they lose MSBA funding it’s uncertain if they’d get it again.
“If not now, when?” he questioned. “If not now, how?”
Discussion about the way the project is funded has often led to that point of agreement between town and school officials: The school needs repair, and the reimbursement is too much of a financial reality to pass up.
“Ultimately, every time we’ve had a town meeting where the townspeople have been asked about spending money on fixing up certain buildings –– the library, the building that used to be the waterworks –– people are saying, ‘We have to take care of our buildings. We’ve been neglectful in not taking care of the buildings,’” school committee member Rizzo said.
“I think from a parent’s point of view, parents want a good high school; they don’t want to have mold and asbestos and have no heat. It’s going to really come down to the people voting for what they want for the future of this Island.”
The problem with having a regional high school is similar to herding cats. If a town vetos the project we will end up like Vineyard Haven. Losing state funds and still having to complete the project.
We are talking about our children’s future, short changing them for money is the worst mistake we could ever make. Do not take this to the towns have a majority island wide vote.
Sadly, it’s not surprising that Chilmark is opposing the idea of a regional, Island-wide vote. Chilmark has the Vineyard’s most exclusionary zoning — only Gosnold, of the state’s 351 towns, enjoys a lower tax rate — and because its zoning makes Chilmark so family-unfriendly, it has a low student census at the high school and thus a low contribution to high school expenses under the current unfair formula. Chilmark needs to step up and support this needed infrastructure for public education on Martha’s Vineyard.
My wish is that the regional school committee decides to bypass the town meetings of all the island’s towns. It is the law which the committee may avail themselves, to bring to the islands voters the question directly yeh or nay on the important issue of funding for the refurbishment and expansion of the regional high school. And so that island taxpayers do not suffer the same fate as the taxpayers of Vineyard Haven who were misdirected by their own town leaders and gave up state reimbursement for which now all of us taxpayers in Tisbury are paying for in our tax bills. More questions of Martha’s Vineyards future should be decided by island wide voting instead of us suffering from small minded local town politics which are run by a minority who talk the loudest and have the ability to keep talking until they wear down opposition.
May we all be mindful In our approach to This project. Ultimately, I’ve come to believe it matters not how we will be asked to vote for this MVRHS building project. We must vote for it. Our Island kids.. are all our kids. the time is now, With MSBA funding it’s an expensive project but without it ………..
Tisbury residents, we have much going on in our town. Many expensive projects are staring at us and they are all important and necessary and so is the HIGH SCHOOL. Lets go Tisbury..Let’s go MV
Bulldoze the regional high school and bring the high schools back to the towns. The dissenters in 1958 were right. Who knows? It could solve some of the island’s traffic problems.
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