Nearly three months after voters rejected a $3.5 million bond to upgrade the track and athletic facility at Belfast Area High School, Regional School Unit 71 is exploring other options for how to fund the project.
Paying for all or part of the project directly through the school budget or launching a capital campaign to raise funds are among possibilities being considered, school officials said.
Doing nothing is not an option, said Susan Robbins, the school’s athletic director. The track is so dilapidated that it can’t be used for meets. And the bleachers and lights at the high school were installed in the 1960s and need upgrades.
“We’re doing the best we can to keep the kids safe while practicing,” she said.
For now, the district is working to develop a new funding plan with the school committee and is moving forward with the permitting process so that it can start work as soon as a new plan is in place.
“There are really only three options,” said Bob England, RSU 71’s interim superintendent. The first option — the bond that would have had taxpayer pay for it — failed in November.
The second option: the district could pay for the renovation. Adding the entire cost of the project to a single year’s budget would be impractical and a “big hit,” England said. But a more palatable option would be to create a designated reserve account for the project and allocate part of the school’s budget to it each year.
Principal Jeff Lovejoy said he wished the district had created such an account seven years ago when it first started thinking about redoing the track and other athletic facilities.
“We’d be pretty close to having the funds if we’d gone that route, but we didn’t,” he said. “Every year that we don’t, it just keeps pushing it down the road.”
The third option would be fundraising — launching a capital campaign to raise part or all of the money for the renovation, England said. The district has already pursued that avenue to some extent — in 2024, Robbins raised more than $200,000 that the district has been using to pay Activias, the firm handling the design and permitting process.
But trying to fundraise and do her job as athletic director wasn’t sustainable, Robbins said.
Now the option of hiring a fundraiser to run a capital campaign is “on the table,” Lovejoy said.
Moving the project forward will require addressing the public’s concerns about the potential health and environmental risks of artificial turf, which can contain PFAS and also lead to more injuries for athletes.
While the administration favors the use of artificial turf because it is easier to care for and can be used for more of the year than grass, Robbins said that no decision has been made on whether or not to use it.
There are turf options that do not contain PFAS and can be recycled, England said.
The district will also have to convince the public that upgrading athletics facilities is a worthwhile use of funds. Lovejoy said that 40% of the student body currently uses the school’s existing athletic field. The school has put millions into renovating math and special education facilities he noted.
“The narrative really comes down to, we can’t put money into athletics, we need to put it into academics,” he said. “We’re trying to say we’ve been doing that. We need balance and try to look at athletics as programming as well, not just an extra.”
