This month, voters in 11 districts that make use of Tri-County Regional Vocational Technical High School will be asked to vote to decide whether the school can borrow $285,992,692 to fund a new school building to replace its dated, 50-year-old building. The vote will take place on October 24th, from 12-8 p.m. in all towns, including Franklin, with absentee voting available, but no early voting.

“It’s a vote on whether we can borrow the money to do the project. How a town will pay for its assessment is up to each individual town,” says Brian Mushnick, Chair of the Tri-County Building Project Committee. “A town can choose to use some rainy-day fund to offset this, and that number could be lower,” adds Mushnick, noting, “There are some towns that have already said that they’re going to absorb it as part of their annual budget and don’t expect to have any taxpayer implications. North Attleboro is one. But those numbers are there if the town chooses to assess the total value to the taxpayers of the town.”

At press time, the Franklin Town Council was considering a vote on September 20th to 

to put a debt exclusion for its share, which, for its 164 enrolled students was an estimated yearly debt of $2,081,813, on the ballot for the town election on November 7th, according to Franklin Town Administrator Jamie Hellen. 

The Massachusetts School Building Association, which moved the project to schematic design phase in March, with the three-story design completed in June, will reimburse “29.2% of eligible costs to the district,” says Mushnick, so the total cost to the district will be $205 million, with contingency built into those numbers.“What happens when you do a project like this, you have to add contingency, because in no way, shape or form, can we come back looking for more money, but you don’t know where pricing is going,” says Mushnick, “You do the best you can to figure it out, and then you go from there, so we’ll see. Our goal is to come in early and under budget.”

Building a new vocational school building made sense, says Mushnick, as repairs to the current building, which is not ADA-compliant and has issues such as pipes built under concrete floors, were assessed at about “$160 million just to repair it and keep it at the present level,” he says.

For detailed information on the Tri-County School Building project, visit https://www.tri-countybuilding.com.