A big change for the Park City Board of Education - the board will host its first virtual meeting tonight via Zoom. The school board is also scheduled to approve a contract to implement the master plan design study.
Hard to hear – unintelligible conversation – and not being able to see the documents being discussed have been just some of the complaints to the Park City School District over the last 10 months while the school board has been meeting virtually.
While most organizations have moved their meetings to the Zoom platform because of the pandemic, the Park City School District held out – telling KPCW that Zoom wouldn’t meet their legal requirements of posting the recorded meeting to its website.
Another big improvement for the public in 2021 is that the school district is now posting the Zoom link on the board of education’s home page.
No longer will it take 4 clicks to get to the page where the live board meetings used to be streamed.
The school board has some big decisions to make at its first meeting of the year. Under the consent agenda, the school board is scheduled to approve a contract with MOCA Systems to work through the design and construction of the district’s master plan.
The upfront payment to MOCA is $100-thousand for the initial phase, which will include project definition, community input, strategy selection and assistance with bond prep. The fee goes up from there depending on what construction strategy the school board selects.
As we’ve previously reported, the various master plan strategies range from $31 million to more than $101 million dollars.
The additional consulting fees to MOCA will range between $675 thousand to more than $2.1 million.
The district has taken the steps necessary to proceed with the project through what’s called lease revenue bonds. By using lease revenue bonds, the district wouldn’t have to hold a public bond election to raise the money for construction - instead, it would use lease revenue bonds that would be approved by the school board and not the public.
However, as part of MOCA’s scope, it notes in the contract that due to possible community resistance, a bond will need to be passed to accomplish the goals of the district and overcome the concerns of the community. MOCA also suggests that the district hire a public relations firm to assist in developing an inclusive communication process to clearly articulate the need for the bond in order to gain community support.
