more on the new school/TGN

TGN file photo Last month, Gov. Deval Patrick signed a bill to authorize sale of 26 acres to the town for use to build a new school. Kerry O'Brien News Staff Writer TEMPLETON — With a parcel of land secured for the planned construction of an elementary school, Narragansett Regional School District officials met with the Massachusetts School Building Authority earlier this week and stated that the project is back in the pipeline. “They’ve restarted the project,” said Narragansett Regional School District Superintendent Ruth Miller. “The MSBA people are genuinely really excited about getting us back on board and excited to work with us to get a school for our kids  — (our meeting) was really uplifting.” Late last month, Gov. Deval Patrick signed into law a bill authorizing the sale of 26 acres of state-owned land at the Templeton Developmental Center, to the town for use as the home of a new school. The Elementary School Building Committee has selected a model school building — Chickering Elementary School in Dover, built in 2001 for approximately $13 million — which is expected to take about 12 acres of land and could be placed in an area of the 26-acre parcel known as Crow Hill. However, school building committee members stated that state officials from the state Department of Agriculture and the Division of Capital Asset Management (DCAM)  stated that plans for a land-trade of the town owned land known as Dwelly Farm for the state owned land at Crow Hill for the school may not fully satisfy requirements. “Dwelly is not off the table, according to DCAM, they can use ‘some’ of it,” building committee chair Kirk Moschetti said. “But there’s no way we’re getting the exchange that we started with.” Although Mr. Moschetti stated that additional funding could be required, they are not concerned about losing the state owned land. “The land is ours for the taking,” he said. “It’s just a matter of doing the bureaucracy part now.” “Worst case scenario is we’ll have to pay $10,000 an acre,” he continued. “It’s not like the exchange all has to be done up front. It can be a working document.” With land acquisition work nearly complete, Ms. Miller said they’re moving on to the third and fourth phases or “modules” — as the MSBA refers to them — of eight modules towards completing the project. “We have modular two doing and now we’re going to work on modules three and four — feasibility and schematic design,” Ms. Miller said. The committee having spent roughly $22,000 to secure land for the project, there remains $209,000 to develop the schematic design and bring the project before Annual Town Meeting voters. “I think we need to be up front with the MSBA that we don’t know if that $209,000 is going to get us there,” Mr. Moschetti said. Committee members expressed concern about the amount of funding, as well as the time line set forth by the MSBA. In a letter to the school district and building committee ahead of their meeting, MSBA representatives stated that the project should be shovel ready by June 30, 2014. “If we follow the state’s protocol we’ll be lucky to be done in two years,” Mr. Moschetti said. “The town needs to throw their cards on the table with MSBA — can we actually meet this deadlines and if we can how are we going to do it?” However following the meeting, Ms. Miller stated that the state building agency will not necessarily cancel the project if they do not meet the deadline. “I think it’s fairly safe to say I don’t think the June 2014 deadline is in stone anymore,” Ms. Miller said. “They didn’t really give us a timeline; they want us to keep working through the process, there are too many unknowns to know what the end date will be at this point.” MSBA has agreed to reimburse the town with 59.84 percent of the costs associated with the school construction, once it is complete.