TOPSHAM

School officials were pleased with the turnout at a straw vote held Thursday where 85 people voted unanimously in favor of keeping a new high school on the current Mt. Ararat High School campus.

There were no votes in opposition of School Administrative District 75’s site selection for a new school, which Lyndon Keck of PDT Architects said in all his years involved in school construction projects, he’s never seen happen before. Bowdoin, Bowdoinham, Harpswell and Topsham were all represented.

The vote was only on site selection. Keck said he expects design work will be underway quickly and that PDT would be back before residents in late spring to share design concepts.

The nearly 43-year-old current school was built with an open-room concept and is known as the school without walls. Keck said it wasn’t built with adequate insulation and is an energy hog as well.

“We have come a long ways when we first found out we were going to be able to do something about our high school facility,” Superintendent Brad Smith said.

The district is between steps six and seven in the Maine Department of Education’s 21- step process for school construction. The district will work very closely with the DOE, which is far more involved in the process than in past years, Smith said.

The building committee’s recommendation for site selection and the results of the straw pole vote will go to the DOE now.

Keck said the existing school cannot be renovated while students are in it. His team found renovation was slightly more expensive than a new high school. There are vernal pools that have been identified on the current campus that Keck said can be built around. He showed residents four site “test fits” that keep students in the building while the new high school is being built. Different test fits configure the road differently and the existing gym.

“When you take away the existing gym you have more land opportunities to build your new competition field,” Keck said. The existing track is a “narrow track” that can have a football field inside, but not a regulation-sized soccer field. To have a proper soccer field, “you build what is called a fat track.”

“One of the things we struggled with is trying to get a fat track,” because the existing gym is dead center in the middle of the site, Keck said, “so it does put constraints on how we think about the future.”

The building committee has not voted on any of the test fits and Keck said he would bet the final design “won’t look like any of these.” The committee will have to wrestle with whether or not to keep the existing gym and if it should do a fat or narrow track.

Keck said building concept design should start next month and budget development should start as early as April and go through July.

Another straw vote will take place a couple months before the project goes to a referendum where there will be firm site and building design and cost estimates and the tax impact in each of the four towns. The aim is to put the project on the November ballot, but it could be pushed back to the following June.

Some questions focused on how much the state will pay toward the project and what the impact could be — information Keck said he couldn’t provide yet on Thursday. He did estimate that SAD 75 could be looking at a high school cost ranging from $30 million to $60 million.

Keck said the state is looking to stretch funds but build durable, well-insulated schools that will last 50 years. Residents will want to know if there are components of the project they want that the state won’t pay for. They do have to option to pay for those things themselves as the state is tough on just what it will fund.

Learn more about the project at construction.link75.org.

dmoore@timesrecord.com