By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
The Hays USD 489 school board voted Monday to formally accept grant funds that will allow it to renovate the Oak Park Medical Complex for use by Early Childhood Connections.
The $1.473 million federal grant can only be used for the ECC Oak Park project.
The ECC would move out of the former Washington Elementary School building on Main Street and the former Munjor school. The district has had persistent maintenance problems with the 92-year-old Washington building.
The building has plumbing and heating/cooling issues and has sewer back-up in the classrooms. The two-story building does not allow for students to be housed on the second floor due to delays in evacuating students in the case of an emergency. The building has no elevator and is not ADA compliant.
The new building would allow all of the birth through age 5-year-old students to be located in one building, eliminating the need for parents to drive their students to Munjor. The renovations will also include a new HVAC system and include a structurally designed tornado shelter.
Munjor would go back to the Catholic dioceses per contract. The board would have to decide what to do with Washington building.
Board member Greg Schwartz, who voted last week against moving forward with the building purchase, again expressed concerns with the project. He said he was concerned this would take a building off of the tax rolls.
Board member Mike Walker said Washington or the land that it was on could be sold, and that land could go back onto the tax rolls.
Schwartz noted the Washington land was in the flood plain. He also said the district had discussed in bond planning that if a new elementary school was built, one of the vacated buildings could be used for ECC.
Superintendent John Thissen said it was a matter of weighing pros and cons.
The former medical complex would come off the tax rolls, but the taxpayers would not have to see an increase in their taxes to pay for the newly acquired building or the renovations.
Schwartz was also concerned the renovations might cost more than the amount allotted in the grant.
Thissen said the scope of the renovations would be limited to what could be paid for through the grant.
The board voted to accept the grant on a vote of 5-2 with Schwartz and Lance Bickle voting against.
The next step in the building project is connected to the $2 million that would be needed in the form of a lease agreement to buy the building. The money to pay for that lease agreement will come out of the capital outlay fund — $250,000 per year for 10 years.
Because the lease agreement would be more than $100,000, there will be a 30-day window in which voters can file a protest petition. If more than 5 percent of voters would sign a petition, the question would go for a district-wide public vote.
The district is on a time crunch because the grant money must be used by the end of June. The board must publish a notice that will begin the protest period as soon as possible because it can’t start work on the project until that protest period has passed.
If a successful protest petition is mounted, the district would not be able to move forward with the project because the public vote would delay the project enough that the district could not complete the renovations by the June 30 deadline.
The district hopes to have all the information for the legal publications ready by Wednesday, and the legal notice published by the end of the week.