Despite Pledge of Collaboration Between Schools and County, Sharp Differences Remain

The Transylvania County Commission and School Board are still at odds over funding for capital projects about four months after agreeing to work together to fix schools.

Front of Brevard High School, pictured last winter. It’s the site of projects debated by the Transylvania County School Board and the County Commission.

BREVARD — It’s been four months since the promised start of a new era in relations between the Transylvania County Commission and School Board, a commitment to complete as much as $94 million in school fixes over the next decade in a spirit of “collaboration” and “communication.”

How’s it going?

From the start, as NewsBeat previously reported, conflict emerged over whether to repair or replace two 65-year-old buildings at Brevard High School. It’s mostly been resolved the county’s way; the buildings are on track to be repaired.

May brought the flameout of Commissioner Emmett Casciato when he waded into the general realm of school financing.

He abruptly resigned days after he reacted to charges of inadequate pay for teachers by angrily stating that they should expect to take second jobs to make ends meet.

Also in May, County Manager Jaime Laughter used the loaded phrase “double dipping” to describe Transylvania County Schools’ requests for local money to pay for projects that had been or were intended to be covered by other sources.

This, too, has been settled, but with lingering disagreements. Commission Chair Jason Chappell described the resolution plan approved this week as containing bonus funding for schools, while one Board member said it placed a “totally unnecessary” financial burden on the district.

Schools officials, meanwhile, have pushed back against the county’s plan to spend $4.3 million on recreation improvements, including the construction of playgrounds that a county construction consultant — Georgia-based Axias — had advised putting off for several years and a new pre-engineered wrestling gym that the Board doesn’t see the need for at all.

The county says this work is not being fast-tracked because other projects can proceed at the same time. But it looks like some of those other jobs will have to wait, school officials said; the county’s newly approved fiscal year 2025 budget appears to show no available money for large and pressing projects that should be covered by the Schools’ state-mandated share of local sales tax revenue.

Which means most of this work will likely be included in the more than $40 million worth of projects expected to receive money in the first issue of bonds that were approved by voters in 2018, money that will be on hand shortly before the end of the year — at the earliest.

For this to happen, Laughter originally said, the final list of projects needed to be ready for submission to a state commission by July 1. In a brief interview after Monday’s County Commission meeting, she said “we’ll put that in front of commissioners in July.”

She said Axias is creating the list with information from a May “scoping” meeting with school officials and that a draft would be sent to them for feedback. But she did not respond to a follow-up emailed question about whether the slight delay in approval will result in any changes to the planned timeline, and Schools Finance Director Gabi Juba said the process of finalizing the project list has not included the level of input from the Schools she expected.

At least one Board member, Chris Wiener, sees such differences as natural between groups of elected officials. 

“We have to remember that we have multiple sets of opinions about multiple sets of issues,” he said after a special Board meeting on Tuesday. “I can’t imagine it being any more cooperative.”

Former Board member Alice Wellborn, on the other hand, portrayed the county’s statements as bullying.

“County commissioners and the county manager have launched an ongoing, giant wave of accusations against this School Board,” Wellborn, a frequent critic of the Commission, recently told Board members, “alleging in public meetings that you have . . . mismanaged funds and generally been grossly incompetent in handling the facility projects.”

Double Dipping?

Wellborn was referring mostly to Laughter’s “double dipping” presentation at the May 28 Commission meeting.

Laughter said then that her intention was to protect the county’s interests. She produced multiple examples of inadequate documentation of agreements with vendors that she said could expose the county to liability.

And her detailed presentation about concerns over dual funding, she said, was meant not only to protect county funds, but guard against possible findings of irregularities from auditors and the “claw back” of grants from state and federal governments.

She allowed that the potential “double dipping” was not necessarily intentional. “Mistakes do happen,” she said.

But the biggest example of this practice presented, she also said, “would overfund those projects by about $1 million.”

She was referring to a February request from Juba to transfer that amount, previously earmarked for other projects, to pay for HVAC systems at Brevard Middle and Brevard Elementary schools. These were part of a larger effort to improve ventilation systems backed by grants through the Covid-19-related Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) program.

At the May meeting, Laughter produced documents that appeared to show Schools intended to fund these projects entirely through this program. And, she said, the  state Department of Public Instruction’s website showed adequate ESSER funds were available to cover the remaining costs.

Based on this information, commissioners denied the transfer.

Transylvania County Schools Superintendent Lisa Fletcher countered at last week’s Board meeting by saying that the HVAC work was never intended to be fully covered by ESSER and that the available money Laughter pointed to has already been drawn down or committed to other purposes.

She acknowledged that there was confusion about the need for county approval for its contribution to this work, due partly to turnover of crucial district and county staffers, including the 2023 departures of former Schools Superintendent Jeff McDaris and County Finance Director Jonathan Griffin, she said.

Juba wrote in an email that mistakes by Schools staff contributed to smaller instances of potential double dipping, including bills for about $28,000 to pay for pipe replacement at Pisgah Forest Elementary School already covered by outside funding — though she also said this issue had been caught last year.

As for the larger matter, the supposed dual funding of the HVAC systems at the Brevard schools, that didn’t happen, Fletcher said last week. The district had always planned on receiving money from the county to complete the HVAC work, and Fletcher submitted additional documents to the county showing this was the case.

At Monday’s Commission meeting, Laughter said that, though Schools had failed to follow a funding approval process required by state law or a county protocol established in 2020, the county did need to provide additional money to complete the work at the two schools.

How much? She set the figure at $912,000. The Commission approved a proposal from Commissioner Teresa McCall providing $412,000 from the county’s Education Capital Project Fund and requiring the district to cover the remaining $500,000.

This county contribution was not previously budgeted, Chappell said after the vote, and “we are providing the Board of Education an additional $412,000.”

At the special meeting Tuesday morning called to address this issue, Juba proposed making $1.1 million available from an unrestricted portion of a grants and donation account, an amount not only needed to cover the $500,000 but another $600,000 the district has spent on HVAC projects this fiscal year.

“I’m not sure they are going to reimburse us for that,” she said, referring to commissioners.

Board Chair Kimsey Jackson voted for her plan  “reluctantly,” he said. Board member Bryan O’Neill, who is running for Commission as a Democrat, also expressed reservations before voting in favor.

O’Neill has seen some signs that relations between the county and Schools “have gotten a little bit better,” he said afterward. “But last night’s meeting was not very collaborative.”

Requiring Schools to come up with more than half of the money “was totally unnecessary,” pointing out that the Schools’ original request was for a transfer, not new funding, he said.

“There was money that had already been allocated and that could have moved to cover this and leave our fund balances in place.”

Recreation Projects

That May 28 meeting was also where the Commission approved Laughter’s plan to fund five recreation projects.

These include a $2.1 million upgrade of the football field at Rosman High School, design for which is already underway.

It also devoted slightly more than $1 million for playgrounds at Brevard, Rosman and TC Henderson elementary schools, and $1.2 million to build the pre-engineered wrestling gym at Brevard High.

Recreation projects have long been “a high interest” of the Board, she said at the meeting, and such jobs can be started quickly because they don’t have to be coordinated with interrelated work, which is the case, for example, with new roofs and the installation of HVAC equipment placed on top of them.

Chappell wrote this week that because of this, “These (recreation) projects will run parallel and not in priority above the identified needs, giving flexibility and autonomy to the BOE.”

All in all, Laughter said in May, “I think this is a great olive branch to offer the Board of Education.”

Which is not how school officials see it.

The district isn’t eager to proceed with any of the recreation projects other than the Rosman High field, and in April Fletcher submitted a list of what she said were more pressing roofing, paving and ventilation projects for funding in the county’s budget for the coming fiscal year, which starts July 1.

Chappell pointed out in his email that the county is already paying for the most urgently needed jobs on this list, including the replacement of failing boilers at three schools to provide heating before the onset of winter.

The Commission initially approved funding for them in May, and this week received a rare piece of good news in the realm of capital improvements. Competitive bids for these projects had come in at a total of $395,000, $181,000 less than a previous quote.

But the $3 million capital budget request Fletcher submitted was gauged to match the School’s expected state-mandated share of local sales taxes revenues for the coming fiscal year.

That amount included $815,000 for the recurring need to replace furniture, computers and vehicles, which did make it into the newly approved budget

Money for the larger projects, all of which were identified as priorities by Axias, does not appear to be in the document, Fletcher said. She has not received confirmation from the county that this is the case, she said, and neither Chappell nor Laughter responded to requests for such confirmation from NewsBeat.

Also missing, Juba said, is $220,000 requested to complete smaller, routine repairs.

“So now, if we have lightbulbs that go out or if we have a toilet that needs to be fixed or if we have a sink that needs to be fixed, we have no money to fix it with,” Juba said.

She also raised another concern. Much of the money for the recreation projects will come out of the county’s Education Capital Project Fund, which was created to service the bond debt.

This fund contains money accumulated from a property tax increase approved by the Commission in 2019 as well as unused portions of Schools’ share of sales tax revenue. It currently stands at about $20 million, Laughter said in a recent Commission meeting.

The portion of the $4.3 million that comes out of this fund will leave less money available for work targeted in the first phase of the bond issue, Juba said.

The playground projects were also on the Axias list, but were not to be addressed until 2029 at the earliest. The wrestling building, meanwhile, has been a particular sticking point.

Though it, too, was on the Axias list, the project was excluded from the roster of high-priority projects the Board agreed to approve in March for the first phase of bond funding, Fletcher wrote in an email earlier this month.

“This spreadsheet, with the note to remove the wrestling building, was shared with the commissioners as well as in a School Board meeting,” she wrote.

This lack of Schools support for the project was reiterated “at multiple BOE meetings, and at multiple meetings with county staff,” Juba wrote.

Laughter has repeatedly posted on Facebook about her support for Brevard High’s wrestling team, of which her daughter is a member. She did not respond to an email from NewsBeat that asked whether this was a factor in her support for the project, and that requested additional information on several other funding issues.

What is clear, Jackson said after Tuesday’s meeting, is that “wrestling and playgrounds are not our first priority.”

“My take,” O’Neill said, “is that those are shiny things for voters, not necessary things.”

Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com