Split votes on school grant, election machines
Larry Griffin
lgriffin@thesmokymountaintimes.com
The Swain County Board of Commissioners voted at their meeting Tuesday, Dec. 5 to apply for a Critical Needs Grant from the state that would help them pay for building a new middle school – though the board was split on it, with Commissioners Kevin Seagle, Roger Parsons and Philip Carson voting to apply for the grant and Commissioners Kenneth Parton and David Loftis voting against.
A lengthy discussion before the vote looped in Superintendent Mark Sale as well as several officials with the Town of Bryson City, on the complications of building a new school on land purchased earlier this year from businessman Mark Fortner on Black Hill Road.
While the grant from the state would help build the new school, it’s not a sure thing that Swain would be awarded the grant yet – the state has declined to give the county the same grant the past few years.
Beyond that, town officials, including Mayor Tom Sutton and Town Engineer Nate Bowe, spoke about difficulties with implementing sewer and water at the Black Hill Road site, particularly given the problems with the town’s wastewater plant which the town is in the process of replacing.
The grant would be for $52 million from the state, of which the county would have to match 5%. The deadline to submit the grant is Jan. 5, 2024, and Sale said competition would be “pretty steep,” as it had been the previous two years as well.
Sale said the amount Swain would have to pay, were they to actually get the grant, would come out to $2.6 million. He said they had ways of getting that money, too, including taking out a loan, and added that the exact prices might change due to construction prices fluctuating.
“We absolutely could [get the money],” he assured the commissioners, adding that they wouldn’t be required to pay that money until the end of the construction of a new school.
Much ado about
infrastructure
Sutton raised some caution about what the process would be like, saying the “infrastructure to support the new school is not in place.”
Bowe chimed in to add that the residences in the Black Hill Road area had their water and sewer set up just fine, but with the number of students coming to a proposed new middle school, the pipes in the ground dating back to the 1960s were “insufficient to serve a school.”
Bowe said the town’s wastewater treatment plant may not be able to sustain a new middle school, either.
“That’s what concerns me,” Bowe said. “All the sewer is pumped to the wastewater plant, and that pump station is already reaching its limit.”
Asked if the work on the wastewater plant to make it sufficient for a new school could be done in five years, Sutton said it would likely take “a lot longer than that.”
“I’m going into my third term dealing with it, and we’re not even close,” he said.
This caused some pushback from Parton: “I asked about this during the land swap, I did ask about capacity. A key point of it was that you said the infrastructure was there.”
Sutton clarified that the town’s position has always been that the infrastructure would be a problem.
Mayor pro-tem Ben King interjected to say that while the capacity for the project was there, the infrastructure was not.
There was some disagreement over whether the boards had spoken about these issues prior. Parton said, “It was asked. It was asked from the beginning.”
“I do not recall that,” Sutton responded.
Parton’s objection was he didn’t want to apply for a grant to build a school at a location that may not be able to support it.
Sutton stressed that they were not saying they couldn’t build the new school. “This is not to tell you not to build the school. Everyone is on board. We’re just looking for a way to make it work.”
Always catching up
Asked about the possibility of building another wastewater plant to solve the problem, Bowe said it wasn’t advisable. “I’d like one plant. No community this size has more than one – even Asheville only has one.”
Seagle said the conundrum of building a school is only part of a larger problem.
“We’re always trying to catch up,” he said. “Even if we build the school five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, the sewer has to be upgraded. Eventually, maybe someone else will build something there – say we don’t build the school, and 10 years from now, the county sells the property, and someone else runs into the same problem.”
Ben King asked what happened to the idea of building a middle school on a different site with 40 acres of property near the high school, which the county had also been considering before settling on the Black Hill Road property. Sale said they would have had to relocate the athletic fields to build there, and Bowe added that sewer problems at that location may have been similar.
Sale said the Black Hill Road property would likely have enough space to build a new, better-sized track.
When it came time to vote on the matter, Parton said his objection was the amount of “what-if’s” still on the table, primarily due to the wastewater issues discussed previously.
The board gave the go-ahead for the schools to apply for the grant, albeit with Parton and Loftis voting against the idea.
Election machines
The commissioners were also split on their vote to purchase new election machines, which has been urged by the Board of Elections as the current machines are getting old and there are big elections around the corner.
Board Chairwoman Hannah Smith said her board has been “trying to be economical and frugal” and waiting before going to the commissioners, but she felt “we’re at the end of that period.” Fellow BOE member John Herrin added they’d been “very lucky not to have a breakdown in an election” before, given the condition of the current machines.
Part of Smith’s urgency for the new machines was proposed new state rules on what technology election machines had to have, which Loftis questioned, asking if the state would help pay for the machines in the event of a mandate on updated ones. Smith said she didn’t believe they would.
The commissioners voted to approve the plan to purchase new election machines, again in a 3-2 vote with Parton and Loftis voted against.