Ok today we are going to look at the committee. First a refresher of what Ms. Franzen said.
“First in forming the committee the administrators set specific criteria they felt most beneficial to the productive meetings. The committee needed to include both mayors, someone who would represent younger citizens as well as older citizens, fine arts, athletics, academics and overall community leaders. Included were: Mark Moine (architect) Tim Neil (my edit Plainfield Mayor), Shawn Geer, Dawn Koob (school bard), Cindy Hannemann (this is my edit I felt full discloser was needed Assistant high school softball coach daughter), Sue Baldwin, Chris Skilton, John Phyfe (my edit Nashua mayor and whose wife is employed by the school), Randy Strabala (again my edit superintendent), Erik Smith (again my edit high school principle) and Ed Anderson (again my edit elementary/middle school principle).
In looking at this list, it is a very respectable group of individuals from each community.”
I concur with Ms. Franzen’s assessment that it was a very respectable group of individuals from each community. In fact I never said it wasn’t a respectable group and I never inferred or implied that any of these people were less then respectable. What I wrote was it wasn’t a diverse group.
4 of the committee members were employees of the school district, and except for Cindy Hannemann all were administrators. I don’t know for sure but most of them were probably from the middle to upper middle class white collar workers. No single moms, on the committee, no working class members, no support staff employees. But that wasn’t really my biggest complaint it was the fact that Mark Moine was an employee of Gardner Architecture and was a key person on all the school building projects that he brought and showed to the committee.
Now in case you did not make the connection. Gardner Architecture received the contract to do the feasibility study for the proposed building plans of the long range committee. Probably what bothers me the most is that this doesn’t seem to bother Ms. Franzen at all. Nor did it seem to bother anyone else. Now I would have been fine with Mr. Moine coming in and explaining architecture details, informing us of what needs to be updated and giving us all possible options. However, Mr. Moine seemed fixated on limited options and really pushing geo-thermal heat. When I questioned him about the alleged cost savings he stated some cost savings for school districts who had put in geo-thermal in the new buildings they had built and how much money the geo-thermal was saving over the old buildings with old boilers. However, that comparison was comparing apples to beef, the items are not even in the same category.
It’s rather misleading to compare energy savings for a type of heating unit in a new structure with all kinds of energy efficiency improvements, against a 50+ year old building with older heating units.
Mr. Moine was also always pointing out how that these building projects really didn’t cost these school districts much money because of all the grants and how many of the cities they were built in contributed money to them.
Well more to come.
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