I presume the District paid for the big ad in the Fourth of July Trib advertising that it has about eleven properties for sale. One non school property listed for sale is a warehouse on Garfield Ave which I think was first bought when the district ran what is now Lake Superior College. Back then it might have been a Diesel Engine training school or something like that. It too was born in controversy.
My Board put it on the market almost twenty years ago. If the District is to make any one-time money selling all its closed schools it will need to get them sold faster than that.
Its a good thing that in these tight time the District won’t have to put any maintenence money into these shuttered facilities. Letting the rot an crumble surely won’t hurt the sale’s price.
JCI and the District didn’t even build maintenance costs into keeping up the new Red Plan Schools. And we aren’t done with the Red Plan yet. The School Board just voted 5-2 to add another $15 million to Red Plan spending. They also voted to do this without a referendum. The Trib described this as a 5% increase. The Board, excercising great caution, refrained from adding an additional $19 million to the cost even though some of this was part of the original Red Plan.
One of a great many unintended consequences of embarking on a complete rebuilding of the District’s facilities was the failure to anticipate being stuck with a dozen unwanted properties. How this will impact the District’s operational bottom line is yet to be determined but it won’t be good.
