By placing on the Nov. 2 ballot a $41.5 million bond to overhaul South Portland High School, the Board of Education and City Council have unnecessarily placed voters in a difficult position.

There is little question the school is in need of costly reconstruction. The building faces health, safety and space issues that range from inconvenient to intolerable, which led to a failed bid for a $56 million bond three years ago. A combination of poor planning and a site rife with ledge and drainage issues has turned the school into a labyrinthine collection of buildings of varying age and condition. It is clearly not a 21st-century facility.

However, the ongoing economic recession has brought extra vigilance to government spending at all levels, and this 20-year bond, with interest, would cost taxpayers more than $61 million, or about $182 a year in taxes on a $200,000 home. Adding to the cost as well are the hundreds of thousands of dollars in reserve and surplus funds that would be used to make up the remainder of the $47.3 million project.

Those figures do not take into account the coming budgetary challenges that will, barring a miracle, force some combination of tax hikes and teacher cuts next spring. Payments due on a multi-million-dollar bond would only siphon more money from where it should be spent: on teachers and curriculum development.

Nor do the figures include the other large capital projects on the city’s wish list, including proposals for a new public works garage and a City Hall, or the coming middle school projects. State funding has been targeted as the savior of the latter project, but when it comes to school construction in Maine, nothing is certain.

That is why it is disappointing that the city could not put forth a bond proposal that better balances the most pressing needs of the high school building with the very real financial challenges being faced by many South Portland residents.

The proposal on the ballot removed much of the obvious luxuries from the failed 2007 plan – extra classroom space, a turf field, a second gym – but it should have cut deeper, and could have done so without severely limiting the project. It seems that officials and committee members, though they dedicated countless hours to the plan, just could not bring themselves to make another round of difficult decisions. We would have liked to see the project at around $35 million, phased in over a few years to lessen the tax impact, just as the current proposal is shaped.

But opportunities such as this bond vote do not come around that often, and the school system cannot wait another three years to act.

So we are reluctantly supporting this bond measure, and we hope city and school officials return to the proposal, if it is successful, in order to further trim the cost, even if in the end it does not immediately meet all the criteria for accreditation. The threats of probation and losing accreditation are misleading; the group that administers those tests is supported financially by its member schools, and any problems can be staved off by demonstrating that the school is moving, however slowly, in the right direction.

So while it is not perfect, we support the bond proposal because the best money a city can spend is on education. We support it because much of the work in the proposal will have to be done soon anyway, the cost is always rising, and the time to move this project forward is now.