Article

Chief exec reports agency is at 'bottom of the barrel'

Thursday, April 26, 2007 • BY DUNSTAN McNICHOL • Star-Ledger Staff

With construction on a new school scheduled for this October, wreckers tore down the old A. Chester Redshaw Elementary School in New Brunswick last summer.

Now the lot on Livingston Avenue is likely to remain vacant for the foreseeable future. The replacement for Redshaw, a $36 million school designed for 1,000 students, was among 27 projects that the state Schools Construction Corp. shelved yesterday for lack of funds.

It was the latest round of dashed hopes for needy school districts around the state, as a $6 billion program to replace overcrowded and decrepit schools with new, state-of-the-art buildings has run out of cash while falling far short of its goals.

"We are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of dollars," said Scott Weiner, chief executive officer of the Schools Construction Corp.

Two years ago, the SCC said its dwindling funds meant that only 59 projects could proceed, and hundreds of other proposals were put on indefinite hold. But last year, the agency said rising costs would force it to cut more from the list.

Yesterday the corporation identified 32 projects that would consume all of its $639 million in remaining funds. The new Redshaw school, ranked 50th on the agency's priority list, didn't make the cut.

That leaves the school's 1,000 students in temporary classrooms in a converted warehouse, and New Brunswick Schools Superintendent Richard A. Kaplan with a lot of questions.

"Why knock (the old school) down if they know they have a problem?" Kaplan said yesterday. "If they were going to knock it down, they should have ranked us higher than 50."

SCC officials say it was not easy deciding which school projects to finance and which to defer.

"Many communities and, more importantly, thousands and thousands of students who were hoping to be in new schools are not going to be," Weiner told SCC board members at a meeting in Trenton, at which the delays were announced. "If the Legislature does not act within a number of months, the number of impacted communities will grow."

Since it was launched in 2000, the corporation has completed 29 new school buildings. Another 23 are under construction.

The 32 projects earmarked for funding yesterday include 25 new schools, meaning the $6 billion construction initiative will have produced a total of 77 new schools -- fewer than half the 161 that the state's needy school districts said they needed seven years ago.

The SCC has been undergoing an overhaul for the past two years, after a series of critical audits revealed that weak management and overspending on professional fees had cost the program hundreds of millions of dollars.

Since last fall, Weiner and other SCC officials have been working to convince lawmakers to authorize another $3.25 billion for the construction program, so it could continue work on the dozens of school projects ready to be built and avoid the deferments announced yesterday.

But lawmakers, faced with a tight state budget and lingering worries about the waste and mismanagement that dogged the early years of the program, have so far been reluctant to support additional funding.

"Now that, hopefully, the administration has righted that ship and the money is being spent appropriately and efficiently, I expect that just like any other initiative and organization, you're going to have people advocating for it," said Sen. Joseph Vitale (D-Middlesex), who headed a Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee hearing in Trenton yesterday.

The attorneys who won a 1998 state Supreme Court order requiring the state to rebuild or replace hundreds of "crumbling and obsolescent" school buildings in New Jersey's neediest communities have asked the court to issue a new order requiring lawmakers to authorize additional construction funding by June 30.

Gov. Jon Corzine did not include additional support for the schools program in the budget he presented to lawmakers for the budget year that starts July 1. Instead, Corzine has included school construction on the list of initiatives he hopes to bankroll through the sale or lease of major state assets like the New Jersey Turnpike or state Lottery.

The state already has invested $120 million in the 27 school projects suspended yesterday, and plans to spend another $40 million completing design work so they will be ready to bid for construction if lawmakers approve additional funding.

"The reality is, if the funding isn't forthcoming, these projects don't get built," Weiner said.

Among the projects set aside is the proposed Columbus Elementary School in Union City. The corporation has spent $8.7 million on that project, including about $1.48 million for the controversial purchase of an apartment building that had been hastily erected on the proposed school site.

Also suspended is a proposed $127 million school on the site of the former Roebling Steel Mill in Trenton -- a project that former Gov. James E. McGreevey had hailed as a model "Renaissance" project.

Projects making the cut include three new elementary schools in Newark -- First Avenue, Speedway Avenue, and a proposed replacement for the damaged Elliot Street Elementary School -- as well as a $53 million International High School in Paterson and a new Park Avenue Elementary School in Orange.

Strapped SCC pulls the plug on 27 schools

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