PALMER — A 35-page report from a consultant says the borough’s process for selecting school sites is flawed but fixable.

The report, prepared by Matrix Consulting Group, was commissioned in the wake of the selection of a site for the now-built and soon-to-be-opened Machetanz Elementary School south of the Parks Highway. After a site was selected, the borough assembly was told that roads to access the school weren’t adequate for the traffic they would be asked to handle and that upgrades would need to be made, more than eliminating any cost savings the borough realized when it chose to build the school on donated land. The assembly has since expressed a bit of frustration that they were asked to approve a site without all the information.

The consultants attended an assembly meeting Tuesday to present their findings that there were “significant failures” in the last few site selection processes.

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The failures noted, “generally represent one of two concerns. The first is failure to follow the existing procedure completely, and the second is the need to modify the procedure to correct several shortcomings.”

Alan Pennington, with Matrix, said the process appeared opaque to a lot of observers, with proposed sites given certain numerical rankings with little justification for why. He suggested a short narrative on each to explain the rankings.

The information regarding why certain sites were ranked the way they were came out afterward, he said, but should have been on the table to start with.

By putting the information out after the fact, he said, the perception among many observes was, “It was information used to justify a decision rather than information used to drive a decision.”

Pennington also suggested beefing up conflict-of-interest reporting, requiring it of selection committee members but also of people proposing sites.

“I don’t want you to be led to believe that we found there was a conflict,” Pennington said. But, “there were perceptions of relationships between people on different committees.”

The Machetanz Elementary School was built on land donated to the borough by developer Rex Turner, who has been working to create a subdivision dubbed The Ranch in the area.

Pennington said part of the solution to the problems would be to level the playing field, so free or donated land wouldn’t receive as high of a preference in the selection process.

Assemblyman Tom Kluberton pointed out that at some point along the site selection process, borough staff recognized that one of Turner’s stumbling blocks to developing the land was that he needed better roads in the area. That information should have filtered up to the assembly, he said, but somehow it didn’t.

“It’s that nasty feeling we’ve been baited and it makes it hard to swallow,” he said.

Pennington said part of what he recommends is making sure that communication lines already in place don’t lose their effectiveness. That would probably solve a lot of the problems experienced in the Machetanz site selection process.

“There’s a lot that’s in place that needs to be followed through,” he said. 

“We had an OK process and it lacked accountability. Is that a fair statement?” Kluberton asked.

“The accountability is there,” Pennington said. “I don’t think information was left out intentionally. Certain criteria were looked at in a broader scale.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.