Don Kerr's Letter to the Editor 01/21/10: No State Aid, No Project

What follows is from me, speaking as an individual and not as a representative of any group or board.

In a thoughtful community such as ours, people know better than to look to lawn signs for accurate information. The level of misinformation reflected on lawn signs that sprung up last weekend regarding the middle school is disappointing. In this community, we can take a hard issue and figure it out without dumbing it down.

The lawn signs take conservative projections on project cost put out by the school district and manipulates them. It inflates the current debt of the school district, and considers over $30 million in state aid as debt. Assertions in the signs ignore the fact that bids should come in lower than projected and that the district's estimates inflate interest rates to cover worst-case scenarios. The most curious concern out there is that the project would move forward at all under such worst-case scenarios.

What if the state aid does not come? Loss of state building aid (which is separate from the operations aid that the governor talks about) is not a real possibility. Such cuts have never happened and have never even been mentioned in Albany, but New Paltz has a plan in place just the same.

As stated publicly by the president of the school board, if there were any question about the state meeting its obligations to New Paltz in state building aid, the middle-school project would not break ground. Once the project had broken ground, the state would be legally and contractually bound to make the payments. Loss of state building aid has never been discussed in Albany, and, speaking for myself, is fairly described by terms such as fantasy, red herring and scare tactic.

I urge people to continue to seek accurate information and credible answers to their questions.

Donald Kerr
New Paltz