BOCES money already spent?

The nine component school districts have awarded the bonding for borrowing more than is now required to build their new 192,000-square-foot BOCES facility. This is about 54 percent bigger than our existing BOCES, yet was designed to handle approximately the same number of students as the old facility.

All of these nine school districts opted to go out and bond for “The maximum estimated cost of the new campus of $42,195,000.” They did however, leave some wiggle room by inserting a clause in their “Summary Notice of Bond Sale.” At least Auburn did.

One has to wonder why they did that because on April 4, BOCES awarded the winning contracts to build this huge and expensive facility on 44 acres for approximately $36.4 million which is $5.8 million (13.74 percent) less than the $42.2 million we approved in our respective school budgets.