REGION 16 — School administrators are hoping that a meeting with state officials will change their minds on a decision to deny any reimbursement for the land bought for Prospect Elementary School.
Region 16, which oversees schools in Beacon Falls and Prospect, bought the 47-acre site off of New Haven Road for $1.55 million in December of 2008 after voters approved the purchase at a referendum.
School districts are eligible for partial reimbursement on land bought for a school. The reimbursement is based on the amount of land used by a school. Prospect Elementary School, which was the largest part of a three-part school building project, sits on 17 acres. The region initially expected to be reimbursed $287,000 for the land, according to a letter from the school board’s attorney, Laurann Asklof of Shipman & Goodwin LLP, to Kurian M. Kurian, supervising accounts examiner for the Department of Administrative Services (DAS).
The region recently received the Department of Administrative Services’ audit report on Prospect Elementary and renovations done at Laurel Ledge Elementary School. The report states the district is ineligible for reimbursement on the land because the appraisals are “unreliable.” The report states that two appraisals were done three years apart, and one appraised the land at $1.55 million, while the other set the appraisal at $660,000.
Director of Finance and Business Operations Pamela Mangini, who joined the district in 2012, discovered that the district hadn’t applied for reimbursement on the land while reviewing the grant application for the building project in January 2013, according to Asklof’s letter.
School board Vice Chair Robert Hiscox said the district delayed moving forward with the project due to the bad economic times in the late 2000s. He said the board didn’t want to put an extra burden on the taxpayers at the time.
However, the region failed to apply for reimbursement for the land when the overall project first moved forward.
The letter states Mangini immediately reached out the state and submitted paperwork three times between 2013 and 2017 for reimbursement. During a meeting in July 2016, the letter states, Mangini was advised that the site-acquisition costs had been “approved by the director.”
“For over three years, the district relied on representations from members of the DAS Office of School and Construction Grants Review Committee that the PES site-acquisition would be eligible for state reimbursement,” Asklof wrote.
Superintendent of Schools Michael Yamin said the district and state had come to an agreement for some reimbursement on the land. Asklof’s letter states the district was offered $50,000.
Yamin, who became superintendent in 2014, said the region made some mistakes by not following the proper procedure. But, he said, the state denied reimbursement because of the issue with the appraisals.
Yamin added the state didn’t inform the region of the issue with the appraisals until the reimbursement was denied.
“If DAS had advised the district that it found the appraisals to be insufficient, the district could have obtained additional appraisals to address any reliability concerns DAS may have had or it would have made the decision to forego the years of resources and energy spent to repeatedly provide DAS with information to satisfy the site-acquisition grant requirements,” Asklof wrote.
Yamin said he requested a meeting with the state to discuss the reimbursement for the land. A meeting was denied at first, Yamin said, until the board’s attorney contacted the state. School officials are meeting with the state next week, he said.
“Whether we get reimbursement or not, at least we get a say in a meeting with the state,” Yamin said.
If the state remains steadfast in its decision, the region could take DAS to court — an option school officials don’t appear likely to support.
“We’re not going to let it go, up until a point,” Yamin said.
Yamin said the region had no other issues with the audit report. He said the district wasn’t counting on the reimbursement for the land in the budget.
However, Hiscox said the taxpayers expected the reimbursement when the purchase was approved at the referendum.
“We counted on the money because we, the region and the towns, assumed that we were going to get reimbursed on the purchase of the land that we used,” he said.
