BAKERSVILLE — After months focused primarily on the ongoing pandemic, conversations about the new school project are back among the Mitchell County Board of Commissioners and Board of Education.
At the Board of Commissioners regular session on Monday, Oct. 5, representatives from the Board of Education, including Chair Brandon Pitman, were present to discuss a lease agreement.
Pitman spoke to the commissioners about signing a lease agreement that would help them move forward with the project and give them access to the $15 million in grant money they had been awarded.
However, the commissioners hadn’t had the opportunity to look over the new lease. They had only seen an outdated version.
County Attorney Lloyd Hise said the school board’s attorney, John Henning, had sent them an outdated version and had only provided Hise with a new draft of the lease agreement that morning. Hise handed out the updated lease agreement to commissioners after Pitman had already begun speaking to them.
Because of this, Hise advised the commissioners to take their time and look over the lease contract carefully before agreeing to sign it.
“It is a long and detailed document that requires a lot of consideration, in my opinion,” Hise said.
He went on to explain the document was more complicated than a simple lease agreement.
“This agreement is much more than just a lease,” Hise said. “This agreement says two things very clearly: The school board will build a school and they’ll be contracting the county to pay. You’re going to pay, they’re going to decide how much you pay. We need, in my opinion, to get an accurate cost estimate…this will require us to go and borrow money.”
Some commissioners seemed to believe the lease agreement would be an unlimited amount of money to the Board of Education, although Pitman explained to commissioners this was not the case several times.
“It doesn’t change any type of agreement that we’ve previously had,” Pitman said. “As a board, we can’t finance the school. We have to come to you, commissioners, in that agreement to have your support financially in doing so…It doesn’t give us an unlimited dollar amount.”
Commissioner Jeff Harding expressed his confusion with how much the school would cost.
“The reason I ask numbers is that I’ve heard $23 million…and then the cost came in at $32 million and a few months after that, I heard $38.6 million and nobody’s ever been able to sit down and explain,” Harding said. “Our boards haven’t met and nobody’s been able to explain to me how you go from $23 million to $38 million.”
Commissioner Steve Pitman and Harding suggested the two boards set up a meeting to talk about architecture plans, money and the lease before moving forward.
“That’s the problem that we’ve had right here is the lack of communication,” Harding said. ”And you can relate to this being an elected official, when you go out in public, people are asking questions…This is something that both boards need to sit down at a table and talk about.”
Commissioner Pitman made a motion for both boards to schedule a meeting in November to discuss the project at length and for the lease agreement to be tabled until January, when a new Board of Commissioners is in place.
The motion passed unanimously.
At the Board of Education’s regular session later in the same week, on Thursday, Oct. 8, Superintendent Chad Calhoun, who was not present at the Board of Commissioners meeting, said what they were asking for at the meeting was misread.
“What we wanted to ask the commissioners for was a lease on the property across the road,” Calhoun said. “Not to start a school, not to build a school and not to ask for unlimited funds, but to allow us, as we start writing more grants and trying to get more money to pay for the school, to say we have a location for the school.”
Calhoun said in his time applying for grants, he knows the school board will receive more money if they can prove they have a location for the school.
“I do know the commissioners have already dedicated that property as a school, but I also know that can always change,” he said. “When you deal with grant writers and people out there that want to give you grant money, they want to know that you have the property. That is always one of the biggest things they ask when you’re dealing with a grant writer: do you have property?”
Going forward, Calhoun said he wants to form a better, more transparent relationship with the commissioners.
“I hate that it got misconstrued the other night, but I’m glad that we can get it back on track and move things forward,” he said. “We’re working on a plan to meet with the commissioners and explain some things and try to have a better working relationship with our commissioners.”
As of Friday, Oct. 23, a meeting between the two boards had yet to be scheduled. The next Board of Commissioners meeting is scheduled for Monday, Nov. 2 at 6:30 p.m. in the County Administration Building in Bakersville.