School Building Agency Must Go: Administration’s Report

By Josh Gohlke, The Record, Hackensack, N.J.

Mar. 16–The state’s troubled Schools Construction Corp. should be abolished and replaced with a streamlined agency focused exclusively on building schools, administration officials say in a report released Wednesday.

The new agency should move away from land purchases and other activities that have complicated the corporation’s task, said the officials, who were appointed by Governor Corzine to overhaul the corporation. They added that it may be up to local officials to provide the property for future schools.

“Particularly as it relates to land acquisition, the siting of schools and how schools fit into municipalities … a lot of the expertise resides in local communities,” said Barry Zubrow, a former Goldman Sachs executive appointed chairman of the schools corporation last month.

The Record reported this month on a controversial SCC land purchase that Passaic city officials had opposed for years. The schools corporation bought property for an elementary school from the family of a reputed mob associate even though planning officials had raised a number of safety concerns, including a pornographic movie theater across the street.

The seller’s family also has a close personal and financial relationship with a school board member. The Attorney General’s Office is reviewing the land purchase.

Wednesday’s report also says authorities are reviewing the corporation’s contracts, expenses and “the interaction of the SCC with contractors and other third parties.” Scott Weiner, the interim chief executive of the corporation appointed by Corzine, said, “There are investigations that are ongoing.” He declined to elaborate.

Created under Gov. James E. McGreevey in 2002, the corporation was meant to expedite $8.6 billion worth of school construction projects, chiefly in poor districts where the building was ordered by the state Supreme Court. But the agency is expected to run out of money with only about a quarter of the schools built, and amid increasingly dire reports of inefficiency and mismanagement.

“The speed with which a project could be constructed became the primary driver for the corporation’s activities,” Corzine’s appointees say in the new report. “Management, accountability, reporting, cost control and transparency all took a secondary priority, if recognized at all, to speed.”

The Department of Education has estimated that the corporation would need another $12.8 billion to tackle the 313 projects it has not begun. But Corzine’s advisers are recommending that there be no further spending until the overhaul is finished.

The corporation or its successor may not even be able to finish the 128 projects that are approved and in progress, about $3 billion worth, half in the planning phase and half in construction. Officials said the agency appears to be $300 million to $400 million short of the funds needed to complete those schools, mainly because the costs were only estimated.

“The problem isn’t that the budget was exceeded,” Weiner said. “The problem is that there was no budget.”

Officials plan to rank the 59 projects in the design phase according to which are needed most, using criteria such as local crowding and safety.

Under the corporation’s successor agency, future projects would be similarly ranked according to educational policy, Corzine’s advisers said.

They also said the new agency would work more closely with local officials to ensure better planning, in some cases delegating more construction management to school districts.

It would also collaborate more with state education and law enforcement officials.

A new agency would require legislation and a transition plan, officials said. They planned to take steps to that effect immediately, but could not say when the schools corporation would cease to exist.

Several Democrats welcomed the corporation’s impending demise. “Good riddance,” said Assemblywoman Joan Voss, D-Fort Lee. Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, D-Mercer, said the corporation would be consigned to “the scrap heap of bad ideas.”

But the state Senate’s Republican leader, Leonard Lance of Hunterdon County, said there would have to be a full account of the corporation’s missteps before he and other Republicans would fund a new agency.

“I suspect we will agree with its abolition,” Lance said of the schools corporation. Of its successor, he said, “I don’t favor appropriating any money to that program until there’s a complete analysis of what already went wrong.”

Passaic schools Superintendent Robert Holster welcomed the calls for more collaboration with local and state education officials, but he said he remains skeptical.

“I hope this change is not just a change in name,” he said.

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