The machinery made permanent

Out of the parking lot came a fund: the school's capital money, held by the town, governed by a town policy, released by a town vote, and routed through a committee that reports to the selectmen.

Start with the part that is genuinely the town’s point, because it is a real one.

Andover Elementary had no way to save for a roof. Unlike the regional district, it had no capital line and no capital reserve of its own. When something large broke, there was no mechanism to have planned for it. The town said exactly this in its own budget presentation in April 2024, named the parking lot among the problems that had made the gap obvious, and proposed a solution: an AES Capital Improvement Fund ^[1].

That is not a scheme. That is a town looking at a real hole and moving to fill it, and a reader who wants to be fair should hold onto it while reading what follows.

Here is what the fund turned out to be.

It is held by the town ^[2]. It was seeded with $100,000, and the money in it comes from the school’s own unspent surplus ^[2]. In December 2024 the Board of Finance adopted a usage policy governing it ^[3]. And at the tri-board meeting that month, the First Selectman told the Board of Education what he wanted next: a five-year capital plan, routed through CIP, just like every other group in town. The school, he said, primarily has to understand what is capital and who is responsible for it ^[4].

The Board of Education did the arithmetic out loud, at the table, and nobody disputed it. CIP makes recommendations. Those recommendations go to the Board of Selectmen for approval ^[4]. So a school proposing to spend its own money on its own building would be proposing it to a committee that advises the selectmen, who would decide.

That is the whole mechanism, and it was assembled in under two years:

The school’s surplus goes into a fund the town holds. The fund is governed by a policy the finance board wrote. The money comes out when the finance board votes to release it. And the projects it pays for come through a committee that recommends to the selectmen.

The finance board had already stated the principle in the plainest possible terms, back in November 2023, while the parking-lot money was moving: putting the school’s money into the town’s fund moves the authority to spend it. The town administrator had said the same thing about the school’s checking account in August: the town controls that money.

Then, in November 2024, something happened that is hard to characterize as anything but what it is. The Board of Education went looking for its own capital fund and could not find it. The town’s $100,000 appropriation had not been transferred. The account was not where the town had said it was ^[5a]^[5b].

The following summer, the town administrator suggested keeping the school’s balance in the town’s interest-bearing account so the town could maximize its earnings, and observed that the school’s unspent money should go back to the town anyway ^[6]. And in June 2025 the First Selectman challenged the school’s transfer of its own unexpended funds, returning to the same sentence he had been using since 2023: the school building is a town asset ^[7].

On that last one the record cuts against him, and it should be said: the town’s own auditor reviewed the transfer and found no impropriety ^[7].

A fund was a good idea. The school needed one. What it got was a fund it does not hold, cannot draw on without a vote of another board, and cannot spend without a recommendation to a third. It was built for the school. It was not built with the school. And when the school went to look at it, it was not there.

The machinery made permanent

Sources