Summary

The District purchased or has agreements to purchase approximately 159 acres between Camp Meeting Rd and Little Sewickley Creek Rd. as its desired site for a new high school. The site extends through three municipalities, none of which have zoned that area for a school.  The site would be accessed from Camp Meeting Rd, but the road would need to be significantly changed, in elevations, width, traffic signals and would need serious support to deal with traffic and grading changes. There are 6 wetlands and 13 streams on the site which would require permitting to affect and potentially costly mitigation. There has been no examination about whether there are species of special concern. This also would require permitting and potentially costly mitigation. All of these items merit concern, but they are insignificant compared to the many concerns about the land/site itself. It is a hilltop ridge. To create a level buildable area, the District’s engineers recommend cutting somewhere between 1.2 million and 1.7 million cubic yards of earth and filling between 1.6 and 2.2 million cubic yards of earth.  Very preliminary estimates to accomplish this range from $17 to $21 million. During construction blasting will be required because the bedrock is so hard. Further, additional site engineering and, possibly, site work will be required because the underlying site is the red bed formation. This is notorious landslide material.  The studies anticipate that surrounding homes will complain of settlement or blast-created cracks. These will have to be addressed. So, the costs we know are: $10 million to date to purchase and investigate and at least $20 million will be required to stabilize and grade the site. Thus, the site cost alone will be over $30m.  And the site has many issues and unknown remaining costs.  This does not appear to be fiscally responsible when QVSD owns the current high school site that has zoning, access, utilities, and all development needs and carries an acquisition price of zero.