CMS asks Mecklenburg County for additional money to complete projects from 2017 bond
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is requesting additional money from the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners to complete all the projects listed as part of the 2017 bond referendum, according to a letter obtained by The Observer.
The letter, sent from the school board and signed by board chair Elyse Dashew, vice chair Thelma Byers-Bailey and Superintendent Earnest Winston, said that cost-escalations for the projects are in the millions of dollars and outpaced what the district had forecast when it designed the bond request. Other measures, such as finding opportunities to increase savings, will not be enough to bring costs in line with available funding, they wrote.
“In order to deliver these projects, we will need to receive additional funds, or we will be forced to make significant modifications to the projects that all of us have promised to the community,” the letter says.
The formal request for additional money comes days after CMS said that the $922 million bond issue, which overwhelmingly passed in 2017, would not be enough to cover the new construction and renovations promised to the community. The letter doesn’t specify how much more money the district wants.
Dashew said Friday that the formula used to calculate cost escalation, provided by the county’s economists, had underestimated the actual rise in prices and could not have anticipated tariffs and the trade war. Dashew also said that CMS was committed to delivering all the promised projects and that she was confident the district would be able to complete the 17 new schools and 12 renovations and expansions.
In its letter, the school board also wrote that the budgeted amount for purchasing land for a south Charlotte relief high school was insufficient. It asked the county for funding to purchase property from the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte if it were to become available to CMS.
The Diocese owns an 80-acre parcel of land in Ballantyne, near Johnston and Community House roads. It is valued at nearly $33.6 million, almost a third of the entire $110 million budgeted for the south Charlotte relief school.
Many of the 2017 bond projects were designed to relieve overcrowding and move students out of decades-old school buildings. In its original list of bond projects, CMS planned to build three 125-classroom schools to replace West Charlotte High School and to relieve schools in Steele Creek and south Charlotte. Each school was uniformly budgeted at $110 million.
CMS scaled down the plans for West Charlotte and Steele Creek to 100 classrooms, while difficulty acquiring land in south Charlotte delayed the opening of the third school by a year.
In August, the district began soil testing a site near Olde Providence Elementary School on land that the district owns. But residents pushed back on the plans to build a school there, saying the site was too small for a high school and that the green space was an important community resource. The cost of land has since delayed progress on the south Charlotte school.
CMS will hold a public meeting Feb. 25 to review progress on all the projects in the 2017 bond, and to discuss next steps for the schools.
This story was originally published February 10, 2020 at 6:44 PM.