The lack of available sewer, and questions about who should pay for it, is holding up planning for a new middle school in Barrow County.
Barrow County assistant superintendent for facilities, Jake Grant, said the main holdup on the project is the installation of county sewer. Grant said no other construction has begun in the area near Mulberry Road so there is no county sewer installed in the area.
Grant said the school system plans to bid out construction for the project by the middle of May.
“We have to send out advertisements for bids in a couple of weeks,” Grant said at Tuesday night’s Barrow County Board of Education meeting. “The sewer issue is holding us up right now. We don’t want to have the bids until the sewer issue is cleared up.”
Among the issues are question of who will pay for extending a sewerage line to the site.
“We are trying to work out our understanding with the county on who is going to pay what for the installation,” Grant said. “We have to have sewer for the project to move forward.”
The new middle school will be the fifth in Barrow County and has a projected completion date of spring 2010. The Barrow County School System currently has Haymon-Morris, Russell, Westside and Winder-Barrow middle schools.
In other business at Tuesday’s BOE meeting:
- the board heard a report that $627,300 in Educational Local Option Sales Tax was collected in March. That amount is down from the previous month’s check of $847,084.87. The total for March 2008 was also lower than March 2007 which was $757,000.
Placement of a middle school on Mulberry Rd. is a bad idea any way you look at it. To begin with the road itself is a narrow farm to market road with an unengineered base,three unbanked deadly curves and dangerous State highway intersections at either end. The "free" Russell property is anything but free for the Barrow taxpayers! Millions will need to be spent on road and intersection upgrades,sewer extentions, possible bridge replacement,right of way aquisition, etc. The Russell property development will require three new schools to be built just to serve the 4000 or so children it will dump into the school system. The proposed school site is located atop one of the last good remaining reservoir locations in Barrow County. Combine the
traffic for the school with that of the subdivision there will be 6000 plus vehicle a day and the peaceful Mulberry Rd. The lifestyle my family and that of all the residents of the road enjoy, will be gone forever due to the profit seekers of the Russell family and the poor planning ability of the Barrow County government.