The Riverside Brookfield High School District 208 Board of Education must decide whether to go forward with two costly projects this year.
Adding solar panels to the school’s roof is one project and building a new culinary lab is the other. If the school board does both projects, it may issue $1 million to $2 million in working cash bonds later in the year to maintain healthy cash reserves.
Putting solar panels on the school’s roof is expected to cost about $1.5 million upfront, although the cost is expected to be ultimately recouped in about seven years through grants, rebates, and energy savings.
The new culinary lab, which will be of commercial kitchen quality, could cost as much as $3 million, although Asst. Supt. Kristin Smetana said that the exact cost of building a new culinary lab won’t be known until architects come up with a design.
“We won’t really know until we’re able to narrow down the scope of the project,” Smetana said.
The school will use a $50,000 matching construction grant it is receiving from the state on one of the projects.
Smetana told the school board at its Feb. 13 meeting that if the school spent $4.5 million on the projects in one year, it would reduce the school’s cash fund balance to about 44% of annual operating expenses. That level of reserves concerns Smetana, although a 33% cash reserve level is generally considered healthy. But Smetana said that the recent history of Cook County collecting property tax payments late and distributing the payments late to school districts makes her uncomfortable with having a cash reserve of less than 50% of the annual operating budget. She said she wants to have at least six months of operating expenses in reserve so that the school would not have to issue tax anticipation warrants, a form of relatively expensive, very short-term borrowing, if cash runs out before property tax revenues come in. With a nearly 44% reserve level, the school could operate for 5.3 months just by spending down reserves without getting any additional revenue, Smetana wrote in a memo to the school board.
“My concern is that for the past few years Cook County has been very delayed in distributing property taxes, like December and January, and so, if that continues, the school district needs to be able to operate for six months and have the cash on hand to do so,” Smetana told the Landmark. “That’s the concern but we won’t really know until we’re able to kind of narrow down the scope of the project and get an actual cost of the project.”
Supt. Kevin Skinkis noted that some bonds related to previous construction will be paid off late this year so that working cash bonds could be issued without increasing costs to taxpayers as compared to previous years. In fact, the bonds issued would be of a lesser amount than the bonds being paid off. Skinkis said that said that if working cash bonds are issued, the use of the bond proceeds would be strictly limited to these two projects.
School officials want to expand the culinary lab because students’ interest in cooking classes has taken off in the last couple of years and because the school is trying to be certified to offer dual credit culinary courses with Triton College. To receive that certification, the school’s culinary lab must be like a commercial kitchen.
Smetana said that the school board has two options. One is to prioritize the culinary lab and go out to bid on that in the spring and see exactly how much it would cost. The new culinary lab would be built during the summer and into the next school year. After bidding is complete, the school board could then decide whether there is enough money left to go ahead with the solar panels this summer or delay the solar panel installation for another year.
The other option would be do both projects at the same time. This option would save the district some money because the firm, Nicholas and Associates, the school has hired to manage the solar panel project could also manage the culinary project at the same time.