A series of tests have revealed extensive chemical contamination on Burlington High School’s campus that could necessitate a complete tear down.

At a school board meeting on Tuesday, superintendent Tom Flanagan said that cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have been detected in the buildings’ window caulking, block and brick walls, floor-tile adhesive and concrete foundation — as well as in the air and in the soil under and surrounding the school.

“Unfortunately, at each step of the process, we find more materials with PCBs,” Flanagan told the school board. “I’m growing increasingly uneasy about the extent of PCB contamination.”

He said that remediation of the chemicals would cost an estimated $7 million to $12 million — and even that might not reduce the levels of airborne PCBs to below what the state has deemed safe.

The chemicals were found last year as the district prepared for a voter-approved $70 million project to overhaul the high school and the tech center.

But the district shuttered much of the campus, located off of North Avenue in the city’s New North End, the day before classes were to begin last September after testing showed PCBs in some of the buildings.

Queen City high schoolers learned almost fully remotely until March, when they began attending classes two days a week at a former Macy’s department store downtown. The school district funded a renovation of the building and is operating there under a three-and-a-half-year lease it signed in December.
Initially, district leaders thought it would take until late summer to figure out the extent of the PCB contamination and decide how to move forward. But Flanagan said that the latest testing results should spur the board to make a decision as early as next month.

“The purpose of tonight really is to make very clear that there’s a serious problem in this project, and we need to take action sooner rather than later,” he told the 12-member school board on Tuesday.
Board members expressed their concerns about the most recent findings.

“Obviously we’ve been trying to patch a sinking ship, so what is it going to take for you guys to let us know this is actually the Titanic?” said school commissioner Jean Waltz. “It just seems like it’s getting worse.”

Commissioner Jeff Wick flagged the high costs for PCB mitigation and suggested that it was time to “stop the bleed” by abandoning the $70 million renovation and moving forward with a plan to build an entirely new high school.

Unclear is whether a new school would — or could — be built on the current campus, or at a different city location.

“I’m sitting here having an anxiety attack because I’m thinking, Where would we go?” commissioner Martine Gulick said. “Maybe you all have information that I don’t have, but that scares me.”

Tom Peterson, a consultant hired to oversee the $70 million renovation project, suggested it could be problematic to build a new high school on the current site. Even if PCB mitigation can be handled cost-effectively, the Institute Road campus is 57 years old and, with PCBs in the soil and in the air, there would be long-term costs for monitoring the buildings and potentially additional remediation.
Building a new facility at a different location would be “a huge lift,” he said, but “at the end of that, you will have a beautiful new high school.”

Flanagan capped the discussion by addressing the board. “It’s no one’s fault that we’re here,” the superintendent said. “We learned about this problem through doing our due diligence.”

As leaders, he said, the school commissioners are being tasked with making hard decisions.

“There are ways out of this and into a high school that we can be proud of,” said Flanagan, “and we need to stay positive and optimistic and know that it’s our responsibility to keep our community safe, and to keep doing this work together.”

The school board’s Building Construction Oversight Committee is scheduled to meet at 5:00 p.m. on Thursday to discuss the issue further.

A broad COVID-19 recovery bill that would plow $105 million into everything from business grants to affordable housing to free diapers advanced toward approval Friday afternoon.

The Senate unanimously approved H. 315, setting it up for a final vote next week. The bill is lawmakers’ latest attempt to ensure a combination of federal and state funds are spent as soon as possible on programs that will help the state “build back better,” as Sen. Jane Kitchel (D-Caledonia) put it.

“It seems like this bill has touched just about every committee in the Senate,” Kitchel, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, told her colleagues.

The bill still needs to return to the House for final reconciliation with the Senate’s numerous changes. But House leaders have been in close communication with their Senate colleagues and are committed to ironing out any differences quickly, said Connor Kennedy, spokesperson for House Speaker Jill Krowinski (D-Burlington).

“We’re probably at the five-yard line, to be honest,” Kennedy said.

About $80 million of the money is coming from $1.25 billion Vermont received from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. Some funds are left over from last year's federal CARES Act. The balance will be from state funds, which are flush thanks to a surprise $210 million largely from higher-than-expected tax revenues.

The bill includes funding for a number of key Democratic priorities, including affordable housing, grants for struggling businesses, environmental cleanup and workforce development.

One of the largest chunks is $15 million to help schools address indoor air quality, a significant concern as children have returned to the classroom during the pandemic. There’s also $14 million to help clean up and redevelop some of the state’s numerous contaminated industrial sites, or brownfields. Another $10 million would help affordable-housing developers get projects moving that would help hundreds of homeless people still living in motels around the state, Kitchel said.

The Senate also increased to $10 million funds for “gap grants” to businesses that didn’t qualify for previous funding, such as for new businesses that couldn’t demonstrate previous revenues. Outdoor recreation would also enjoy a big boost, with $5 million going to the Agency of Natural Resources for trail work and another $5 million dedicated to the Vermont Outdoor Recreation Economic Collaborative, an economic development effort around recreation businesses.

The bill includes a number of education initiatives, including $3 million to train teachers to improve how they teach literacy, $1.4 million to train new nurses in collaboration with nursing homes, and $1 million to help schools find students they’ve lost track of during the pandemic, a phenomenon she referred to as "ghosting."

"We're really going to have to make some concerted effort to reconnect students with schools," Kitchel said.

Not all expenditures are big-ticket items, however. The Senate also set aside $25,000 for an audit of state deputies, and increased by $82,000 the funds set aside for needy families with children to pay for diapers.

Senate Minority Leader Randy Brock (R-Franklin) asked whether what was characterized as one-time spending would result in programs that the state would need to continue paying for when federal relief dollars dry up. Kitchel said her committee was "absolutely vigilant" to make sure that wasn't the case.

The bill references holding $20 million in reserve to help solve the state’s pension crisis, but Kitchel said her committee didn’t have the time to drill down on that issue and will have to return to it later in the session.

“We intend to address this problem before we leave this year,” she said.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) is co-sponsoring a new bill to clean up the scandal-plagued federal program that resulted in what officials have called the largest financial fraud in Vermont history.

Leahy, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is again teaming up with fellow committee member Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to introduce a suite of reforms to the EB-5 investor program.