In December 2021, a West Amwell resident made an Open Public Records Act request to the school district, asking for any emails or documents that mention the referendum, facilities or Class III officers for the year 2021, including emails to/from the 9 Board of Ed members and the Superintendent. The response to that request included over 3,300 emails and dozens of documents. These series of articles documents what we found.
By mid-September, the Superintendent had had a number of meetings with his Key Facilitators. One of the important messages he was hearing from them is that people needed to hear what would happen if the referendum failed.
In response to that, he sent the following email that he sent to all 9 Board of Education members:
What he wanted to highlight was this so-called “Option 2”. This was to be an 8 year long program, where each year we would take $2 million out of the existing budget to run through this punch list of renovations. That punch list is shown below in Figure 1.
This is the first breakdown we’ve ever seen of any of the facilities options in the Superintendent Suozzo era. The problem with it is that the numbers are all horribly inflated.
A new trailer at WAS is estimated to cost $400,000. That is more than a lot of houses in the area cost! But research shows that portable classrooms of the size and type already at WAS only cost $30,000-$40,000 fully installed. The Superintendent seems to be off by 10x.
A new tiny security vestibule at WAS is estimated to cost half a million dollars!! Yes, a half a million for a security vestibule.
Cameras and Door access controls at the two schools? A quarter of a million, an absurd amount in the age of wireless cameras and modern computers.
Then we get to the HVAC replacements. Between the two schools, it would cost $10 million according to the Superintendent to renovate them. Go research commercial HVAC systems. . They cost a LOT less then the Superintendent indicates, even in older buildings. These things are generally priced out by the square foot. A recent referendum in South Jersey costs a similar amount ($9,995,000) – but that is for a 400,000 square foot building! LPS and WAS combined are 1/10th of that size.
ADA accessibility is estimated to cost $1 million per school, even though ADA accessibility does not require them to renovate every bathroom but simply provide one or two that are compliant, along with minor ramps that need to be provided. There are similar problems with pretty much every number in that spreadsheet.
All told the Superintedent’s pretend $16 million cost was clearly used as a scare tactic. One Board member responded “No kidding this is ugly!”.
But in reality, if you compare the punch list with similar school budgets and referendums, the actual costs of all these items are closer to the $2-$3 million range. In addition, the Dept. of Ed would finance up to 40% of costs if this was done as a small referendum. The actual costs to district residents are likely 8x-10x lower than this what this doomsday scenario would indicate.
A copy of this document was given to one of the key communicators, who used it as a bludgeon to scare those he were inclined to vote no. The BOE decided not to release this breakdown to the public, but they did allow the Superintendent to use this as the basis of his threat in “Video #2” to the public. At the end of the video, he tells voters that if they didn’t vote yes, the BOE might be forced to cut programs for 8 long, grueling years while they slowly renovate (and make students and teachers lives miserable). Of course none of this was true, but that didn’t stop the narrative from being pushed to the electorate.
This is why the referendum results need to be overturned. The BOE and Superintendent manipulated the voters the whole time by feeding them a stream of misinformation like this.
