It took the Fairfax Board of Supervisors about five minutes to drive a stake into the cold marble heart of the Gatehouse II project, rejecting the School Board’s cockamamie decision to spend $130 million (with interest) for another administrative building in Merrifield.
Chairman Sharon Bulova said the expense couldn’t be justified, considering the fact that County Executive Anthony Griffin’s proposed $3.3 billion budget contains an almost 4 percent decrease in spending and the county still faces a $650 million shortfall.
A School Board press release says FCPS will not pursue the acquisition “at this time” – but repeats the same baloney about how buying a commercial building that is decreasing in value every day will somehow “reduce overhead costs and redirect them to the schools.”
“We understand that the volatility of the current economic climate presents very serious challenges to our community and the fiscal uncertainties continue to mount,” said School Board chairman Dan Storck. “However, this was a creative solution that would have significantly reduced our administrative costs and enabled us to serve children better.”
Months ago, FairfaxCAPS posted a detailed financial analysis of this outrageous misuse of school funds on its website (www.FairfaxCAPS.org). Storck and FCPS Supt. Jack Dale must think that the citizens of Fairfax County are brain dead if they believe the public thinks that buying a building for more than it’s worth is going to save them money – especially after the widely touted “savings” for Gatehouse I never materialized.
Scott Chronister, President of FairfaxCAPS, easily refuted Dale’s argument that Gatehouse II would not impact other school construction or renovation projects by pointing out that the Economic Development Authority bonds FCPS was going to use to buy Gatehouse II have traditionally been used to finance school construction.
“Using bond funding to renovate a second administrative building with a floor-to-ceiling granite lobby, a state-of-the-art fitness center, and an on-site cafeteria with outdoor seating instead of building and renovating schools is the very definition of a negative impact. This is a game of semantics to cover up misplaced priorities,” Chronister said.
Amen.
In the middle of what economists are calling a once-in-a-century economic free fall, when taxpayers are watching jobs, home equity and retirement funds literally disappearing before their eyes,
Dale and the bobbleheads on the School Board want to spend another $130 million on overpaid school administrators instead of kids?
On a marble palace for paper-pushing adults while thousands of children have to learn in 900 flimsy trailers that cannot be secured, which one veteran teacher told me were nothing more than “chicken coops”?
I have just one question for the supervisors: Why did it take you five minutes?
