Brewer voters approve spending for new school
Wednesday, December 05, 2007 

Nearly nine out of 10 residents voted in favor of the $39.5 million Brewer Community School, a planned pre-kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school designed to replace five aging and deteriorating schools in the city.

"It’s a landslide," City Clerk Howard Kroll said Tuesday while tallying the votes.

The 1,215 ballots were hand-counted with around 85 percent of residents voting in favor of the new school, he said.

Brewer Community School is designed as a two-story, 156,350-square-foot building with shared areas in the middle for such things as the cafeteria and media center or library and wings to separate the students by appropriate age groups.

The school, which when built will be the largest elementary-middle school in the state, has 71 classrooms and can house 1,050 students.

One voter, Jeane Sprague, 37, who has three children in Brewer schools, said approving the school project was easy.

"Our district needs a new school," she said, "one that we can be proud of."

Construction is scheduled to start in fall 2008, but Jerry Goss, chairman of the Brewer High School district trustees, who own and operate the city’s school facilities, is pushing for an earlier start.

"Let’s get the process rolling," he said, calling the project a "gift to our future."

The turnout was very good considering "it’s a single issue and a bad weather day," school committee Chairman Mark Farley said.

Several local officials gathered at the Brewer Auditorium to find out the results. In addition to Goss and Farley, City Councilors Manley DeBeck, Larry Doughty and Joseph Ferris were joined by Washington Street School principal Janet McIntosh, school board member Calvin Bubar and Superintendent Daniel Lee.

Lee smiled when he heard voters approved the project.

"We did our homework," he said.

Ferris said, "Fifty years without building a school is a long time." The project will replace four elementary schools and Brewer Middle School, all of which were built before 1957.

Residents actually resoundingly passed four ballot questions, according to the unofficial results, Kroll said.

The first referendum question asked residents to increase the district trustees’ debt limit from $5 million to $40 million. Residents voted 1,013-188 in favor of increasing the limit.

The second asked if district trustees could issue bonds for $36.8 million of the project with all but $133,000 for the property being reimbursed by the state. Residents supported that question 1,093-116.

The third question asked if $2.6 million should be added to the project for an auditorium, paid for by residents. The fourth asked if in-kind gifts could be accepted.

Question 3 passed by a vote of 1,042-171, and question 4 was endorsed 1,115-89.

The new school will be located at the corner of Pendleton Street and Parkway South on the site of the condemned Pendleton Street School.

Construction on the school is scheduled to be complete in June 2010.

A copyright article from the Bangor Daily News, Wednesday, December 5, 2007.