Yuku free message boards

Not to split hairs with you Insider, but since the residents/taxpayers pay for all the public projects, I'm not sure it ultimately matters whether we save the money on our rates or use the savings in the general fund for other projects --

Yes, CSO and water and sewer savings would reflect savings in water/sewer bills -- not such a bad thing. I wouldn't mind those rates dipping a bit.

On the road projects like the recently completed one on Allen Street that are paid for by Chapter 90 funds, instead of spending everything on one project because of inflated costs, we could continue to bank the savings and pave and fix more roads -- not such a bad thing.

And finally, although we apparently will continue the sewer-project-killing betterment subsidy there won't likely be many future public sewering projects, don't forget or ignore that the 25% share the city is obligated to pay contains part of those road detail costs and that money comes directly out of the General Fund debt service -- So if you consider all the public sewer projects over the last couple of decades and figure their costs, figure the costs of the details on those projects and figure that the general fund carries a portion of those costs until the projects are paid, I think you'll see that it does in fact directly impact our taxpayers, residents and the ability to provide other services.

JG

Unfortunately, Tyu, you forget that the savings recognized from closing Fuller had to do with the nearly 2 dozen teachers and staff positions that were eliminated throughout the district as well as the ongoing energy and maintenance savings that altogether totaled somewhere around a $1m give or take -- but to answer your question, I don't think anyone likes the plan of shutting a school and cramming the kids into the other schools -- the Plan for Effective Learning Communities may have excellent goals in mind, but no one argues that that this was the best way to implement it. This implementation was driven purely by economics and the need to further reduce our already depleted school staff - of which we've lost (I've lost count, but I think it's close to 70-80 positions in the past 5 years?). The only reason that the Fuller continued to be open this year as the "Fuller fifth" was because of some very hard choices and hard work by the Council last year to cobble together enough funds to keep it open so that the entire elementary system wasn't completely crippled with over-crowding. As bad as it was with the influx of the k-4th graders into the other schools, imagine if we had added the burden of the 5th graders to that mix without the facilities to deal with them.

We have to put the kids somewhere -- and in a perfect world, or in a world where education and how it's delivered really mattered -- instead of simply shuttering a school and jamming the kids into the other facilities, we'd be looking at building a new school out in West Gloucester/Magnolia area and fixing and renovating the other schools to bring them up to 21st century standards. But this community isn't in a position to do that right now and the state school building funding isn't coming our way in the near future so we do what has been done all too often in the past -- we come up with a band-aid fix and hope for better days. In a word, it stinks -- If you have a better plan and the means to make it happen, show up at the next School Committee meeting and present it under oral communications -- I don't think any of us are averse to hearing new ideas -- it's just that not all those ideas are grounded in reality. But hey, give it a shot -- JG