Rezoning on the horizon?
Plans to fund any new school construction projects this year were not mentioned during the County Commission’s last meeting, despite being presented a list of the county school board’s construction priorities.But commissioners did spend about 40 minutes questioning whether Hamilton County Schools is looking at every possible option to address school overcrowding and how the district accumulated more than $200 million in deferred maintenance.Interim Schools Superintendent Kirk Kelly said the board’s top construction priority is to build a new Harrison Elementary, then Chattanooga School for the Liberal Arts and East Hamilton Middle. He said additions at Snow Hill Elementary, Howard Middle and Spring Creek Elementary are also needed to help with overcrowding.Commissioners Warren Mackey, Joe Graham and Greg Martin asked why the district wanted to build new schools when it had empty classrooms in some schools across the county.Martin, who served on the school board until being elected to the commission late last year, said the school district needs to take a serious look at rezoning.“Rezoning is not going to solve all of our problems,” Kelly said. “We still need these new additions.”Addressing the large amount of deferred maintenance, Kelly noted that the average age of the county’s schools is about 40 years old.By Staff Writer Kendi Rainwater
With requests coming in for chunks of the $900,000 Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger essentially gave to the County Commission last year, Vice Chairman Greg Beck wants to go ahead and split the money evenly between districts.
In January, Coppinger confirmed he offered to let the commission have one-time access to $900,000 of the county credit line to spend on large school and community projects in fiscal 2017. The undocumented discussion took place after a budget workshop last spring when commissioners opposed the proposed exclusion of their special district money for the second year in a row, he said.
Between three projects recently approved by the commission – resurfacing the track at Red Bank High School, purchasing an athletic field striper for Ooltewah High School and building football field bathrooms at East Hamilton School – nearly $180,000 of that $900,000 has been tapped.
Last Wednesday, Beck told his colleagues they needed to go ahead and split the money instead of “going around and around” about it.
“I’m working on a proposal, or resolution, that will allow the remaining portion of that designated bond money to be equally divided between the other eight commissioners up here on this dais,” Beck said. “I want to make sure there’s no squabbling about the money that’s left.”
Dividing the bond money runs counter to Coppinger’s call for the commission to look at the county’s big picture when figuring out how to spend it.
“The sensible, reasonable part of this is that we look at this collectively, look at the county as a whole and not so much about how much gets spent in [a particular] district,” Coppinger said in January, when the commission discussed another request for a chunk of the pie, a new track for Central High School.
The track makeover, requested by Bankston at a cost of $500,000, first flopped on Jan. 4 when five commissioners abstained from voting, leaving Bankston with only four votes, one short of what was needed to pass. Two weeks later, the commission voted 5-4 to table the issue indefinitely. Commissioners Beck, Fields, Joe Graham, Warren Mackey and Greg Martin supported tabling Bankston’s request.