While there are no articles on the Annual Town Meeting warrant that deal with the major renovation project planned for the Pollard Middle School, the specter of the $300 million-plus price tag for the project appears to be gaining an increasing share of the attention spans of those involved in town budgeting.
The project has certainly captured the attention of town leaders for many years. But the side-view mirror warning – “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear” – kicked in early in 2024 when the town was invited into the Mass. School Building Authority process for supporting major school construction efforts.
This set in motion a timeline that projects a townwide referendum vote to approve a Proposition 2½ override to support the project will be held in November 2026. This assumes the town’s application moves as scheduled through the protracted MSBA process for securing state reimbursements that could cover between 20% and 25% of the project cost.
At the April 22 Select Board meeting, Town Finance Director Dave Davison presented an in-depth “Debt Financing Outlook” that provided nine scenarios for how the town could manage tens of millions of dollars in new debt obligations via payments that would be spread out over a 35-year period.
“The (Pollard) project is, by far, the largest project that’s ever been undertaken by the town,” Davison told the board.
He said he reviewed all the town’s past “debt exclusions,” a list that includes multiple Needham High School and elementary school projects, a library renovation, the construction of public safety buildings and prior Pollard-related renovations.
“For all those projects together, the total is a little over $329 million,” he said. “The Pollard school is $311 million.”
Referring to the possible fall 2026 override vote, Davison said, “if approved on the timeline, the project will have a significant impact on the average tax bill for several years.”
Davison’s presentation featured a chart that projected the debt related to the Pollard project would begin showing up on real estate tax bills in 2029 and likely add $1,250 to the average single-family tax bills that year. That number would grow and peak at $2,040 in 2032 before declining incrementally but remaining above $1,000 per year until 2055.
Town Debt Policy
The Pollard debt would make it virtually impossible for the town to adhere to the Select Board’s longstanding “3 and 10” debt policy. That guidance calls for the town to “allocate or reserve three percent of projected General Fund revenue (e.g. property taxes, less debt exclusions, state aid and local receipts) for debt service.”
It also states, “the Town will strive to limit total debt service, including debt exclusions and self-supporting debt, to ten percent of gross revenues.”
Davison’s projections indicate that the town would likely exceed either one or both of those targets for perhaps more than a decade starting in fiscal 2028.
Near-term impact
“In the long run, we’re all dead,” John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1923, intended as a warning that focusing too much on the long-term consequences of economic policies can lead to inaction on immediate problems.
The current chairs of the Select Board and Finance Committee seem to be heeding Keynes’ advice.
“I’m not saying Pollard doesn’t need to be renovated. It does,” said Carol Fachetti, current chair of the FinCom, adding that Davison’s report mirrored FinCom’s thinking on the need to be fiscally prudent.
“It wasn’t shocking. It’s what we’ve been saying for several years.”
“I think the town needs to use their best efforts to delay projects and figure out a way to build a school that will be better than what they have and serve the town’s needs. But maybe it won’t cost $314 million.”
Select Board Chair Heidi Frail also reported that Davison’s report, while appreciated and valuable, was not a call to action.
“We’d already started preparing for Pollard,” she said. “We’ve put in place a number of mechanisms – the debt stabilization fund is one. We have all the enterprise funds that separate out all those functions that can be self-sustaining.”
Both Fachetti and Frail strongly rejected the notion that the town may be entering a period of fiscal austerity that would require dramatic reductions in spending. Both used the same alternative word – priorities.
“I think we need to be very careful about our priorities as opposed to austerity,” Frail said.
“We’re not facing imminent disaster but we have to be prudent about our priorities on how we allocate our capital,” said Fachetti.
Frail also said the process was not so tidy as to allow for a separation of projects into “nice to have” and “must have” categories.
“When you look at a giant project like Pollard, it really needs to be done,” she said. “But we also have people who are working in the worst conditions in the DPW,” a reference to the conditions at the 470 Dedham Ave. building that many see as dire.
“Everything that we’ve investigated so far is a really worthwhile project,” she said of the priorities on the town’s long-term capital plan.
“It just means we have to really be careful. And some people are going to be very disappointed because their priority is not going to be our priority. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not an important thing, right?”
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