Voters to decide on $26.5M bond

Whitefish voters will decide the fate of a $26.5 million bond issue to build a proposed new elementary school to address aging infrastructure, security and capacity issues.

Approximately 9,500 ballots were mailed out Sept. 15. Ballots must be received by the district office on Oct. 3.

If approved, taxpayers who own a home with a taxable value of $200,000 could anticipate taxes to increase by $130.

The bond issue request is the culmination of a planning process stemming back to a traffic-flow study in 2015 and formation of a task force that led to uncovering more severe problems with the building. Since then, planners, district staff and community members drilled 16 options down — from doing nothing to various remodeling scenarios — and landed on the proposal of building a new school while retaining portions of Muldown.

“This is not because we want to. It's because we have to,” said Whitefish School District Superintendent Heather Davis Schmidt during a meeting at the Daily Inter Lake that included other school district staff, a school board trustee and representatives of a community-run “Vote Yes for Muldown,” campaign.

If approved, the new elementary will be 84,000 square feet and accommodate up to 756 students. With current enrollment hovering around 700 students, Muldown is already the largest kindergarten through fourth-grade elementary in Montana. The district anticipates enrollment will have ups and downs, but will ultimately remain stable based on a demographic study it commissioned.

While the large building capacity may not be an ideal size for an elementary school, Davis Schmidt said elementary enrollment is not large enough to necessitate operating and staffing two schools.

“It's a careful balance between walking into a new school at capacity or having a half-empty building,” she said.

If built, the new elementary school would be located adjacent to Muldown and south of Whitefish High School. Proposed plans also include retaining portions of Muldown that are deemed functional such as a kindergarten wing, a two-story first- and second-grade wing and the gym. The goal would be to eventually repurpose those areas.

“We have built into that budget what they refer to as ‘buttoning up,' so they'll be secure and have heating systems and will be functional, but we're not going to repurpose them yet,” Davis Schmidt said that in the interim the facilities could be leased.

Some repurposing ideas include relocating maintenance facilities, which are currently located in the middle of the district's traffic flow problem, or starting an early childhood education center if state funding became available.

Built into the bond is a 15 percent contingency fund.

“If we don't spend that money it goes back to taxpayers,” Davis Schmidt said, adding that the bond issue amount also accounts for inflationary costs of construction.

A contingency fund was something the Whitefish High School renovation and expansion project lacked. The $23 million high school construction project, which was completed in 2014, relied on private donations and money from the city's tax-increment finance district to bolster a $14 million bond issue passed by voters.

Muldown opened it's doors the fall of 1967 with an experimental open-space concept and the vision of Lloyd “Mully” Muldown who served as Whitefish superintendent from 1960-71. Post-war construction however, wasn't built to last. Rather the focus was on getting buildings completed quickly, efficiently and affordably. The last major renovation to the school was completed 1992.

The building is now facing serious structural issues, specifically with un-insulated roofing, leaks and a boiler original to the building that is on its way out.

The roof over the original part of the school was designed so that heat would rise and melt snow, but if the boiler goes out there will be a big problem.

In a December 2016 Daily Inter Lake article, District Maintenance Director Chad Smith described spending the first hour of each day ensuring the heating and ventilation system was working properly. If it doesn't, parts typically have to be manufactured.

“We're now required to snow blow the roof every time we have a snow event,” Davis Schmidt said, noting that the snow load capacity for the original portion of Muldown is half of where needs to be. “It costs us about $3,000 every time it snows. We have three specialized snowblowers that are permanently on the roof. They get craned up there at the beginning of the season.”

Repairing and upgrading the existing school may cost nearly as much as building new and wouldn't make much of an impact, if at all, on improving or enhancing the learning environment, Davis Schmidt said.

“For example, we need two gymnasiums. Right now our gymnasium is split by a curtain and we have two classes going on at the same time. We have music classes happening on the stage in the multi-purpose room which probably doesn't sound too bad until you hear that lunch is going on at the same time that the music class is occurring. So in order to create those additional spaces we needed to invest more money,” Davis Schmidt said.

Mike Powers, president of “Vote Yes for Muldown,” spoke to the improved security a new building would provide compared to Muldown.

“We do have safety and security issues that don't really make headlines as much,” Powers said, noting how sprawling the existing elementary is with numerous entries and exits. “You can walk right into the kindergarten area from the main entrance without seeing the office.”

The school district has not yet gotten preliminary renderings of what the new elementary may look like.

“We have not, on purpose, done any of that because we don't want people to focus on the design. We want them to focus on the need and the opportunity. The design would come after the bond passes and that would take us I think six to eight months,” Davis Schmidt.

“We are trying to create something functional for our kids at a cost that's very reasonable to the taxpayers.”

If the bond passes, the district would start the design phase with an ideal goal to open the school in the fall of 2020.

If the bond fails the district will regroup and ask for another one because the needs won't disappear, according to Davis Schmidt.

Kalispell Public Schools is also in the midst of addressing its overcrowded and deferred maintenance in its five elementary schools through a $25.3 million bond issue, of which, $15.2 million is funding a new elementary school currently being built. The new Kalispell elementary school will house up to 450 kindergarten through fifth-grade students.

Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.