Special Board of Aldermen Public Hearing — 12/16/2019 Page 20
Chairman Dowd
Is that another question?
Mr. Teeboom Yes because that’s a first year payment on this debt, $8.9 million; is the debt going down by $8.9
million.
Chairman Dowd
Treasurer Fredette?
Mr. Fredette
Well I’m not sure $8.9 million is the first year payment, it depends when the bond is sold, how it is sold, if we do
bands prior to selling, there’s a lot of aspects to this bond that we don’t know yet. We could do an equal payment
bond versus liberal principal which the payment would be lower. You end up paying more in interest but the
payment is lower at the beginning. So | don’t know what is going to be done at that time.
Mr. Teeboom That’s not an answer, I’m going by your own analysis, your own bond statement, your own bond
statement states an average payment and the average payment is correct over 25 years, it does average out, it
ignores the beginning payments. Your total payment of interest of $53.69 million is correct. So either your analysis
is incorrect or it is correct. You can’t just say well | don’t know what is going to be. You have to do a bonding
analysis, when we did the high schools and spent $156 million some 20 years ago, there were very detailed
bonding analysis done before anybody talked about adding a huge amount of bond payments to our budget.
Chairman Dowd
Mr. Teeboom you do realize that after careful one-year plus analysis, we determined we had to do this work to
these middle schools in order for the educational requirements to meet the State standards. And you do also
realize that if we were to renovated Elm Street which doesn't include building a new school, that it would have
added somewhere between $15 and $25 million additional dollars and we wouldn’t have had something that met
the State standards for middle schools. So this is a project that we need to undertake. It’s like back in the day
when we had to build the two high schools because the school that was built before that was built on the cheap
and was falling apart. So our intent is to build a good school.
Also as far as Harvey is concerned, Harvey has done a number of schools and are currently involved in building
schools. So they have an extensive amount of experience in pricing these things out.
Mr. Teeboom | have no doubt about that, they should go to Fairgrounds to find a column that’s got my name on it,
because 25 years ago we renovated Fairgrounds. | am familiar with school renovations, all am | asking is can we
afford this size project? Do we, for instance, have to do all the 3 middle schools just for equity, just many
questions have to be asked. You do a needs analysis, you have to do a detailed bonding analysis to look at our
current bonding which projects bonding going forward against an $18 million dollar bond which more than doubles,
it doubles $166 million to $172 million added as | said before to our City and School debt load. These have to be
done. And how much money are you going to get for Elm Street School? Are you going to sell it? Is that going to
off set this bond, that’s another question Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Dowd
We are not in a position to answer that question right now. The intent is that if we are not using it for a school, that
it will be turned over to the City to do whatever the City wants to do with it. You have exceeded your time. There
is going to be another session, so please let someone else come up and testify.
