Donald O’Day, left, a Long Lots School Building Committee and RTM member, asked the selectwomen to approve hiring a consultant to collect information about what other communities have spent to design and build new schools. At right, Jennifer Johnson, a fellow RTM member, questioned whether discussion of that data in executive sessions of the building committee and Board of Finance is allowed under Freedom of Information rules.

By Gretchen Webster

WESTPORT — A firm has been hired to compile data for the Long Lots School Building Committee on school construction costs in nearby towns to help plan a budget for Westport’s newest elementary school. 

Information collected by the firm, Colliers Project Leaders USA, will help the committee compare costs and devise “benchmarks” for a tentative budget before the Long Lots Elementary School project is put up for bids, Donald O’Day, a committee member and Representative Town Meeting member from District 3, told the Board of Selectwomen on Wednesday.

“The costs for this agreement are capped at $10,000 … and it is going to be covered by the $400,000 appropriation that was already made for the groundwork for the Long Lots Building Committee back in 2022,” O’Day said.

Early, overall cost for the new Long Lots, which will replace the seven-decade-old school on Hyde Lane, have been estimated to be between $90 to $100 million.

Although the selectwomen approved the agreement unanimously, Jennifer Johnson, a District 9 RTM member, questioned O’Day’s statement that “some of the data will probably have to be presented in executive session.” Freedom of Information laws might require that the information be presented at a public meeting, not executive session, Johnson said.

“I encourage you to make sure that we are following our FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] laws, whether or not we can go into executive session regarding the public being able to know the benchmark costs for this project,” Johnson said.

O’Day explained that although the Colliers’ data about costs associated with designing and constructing schools in other communities would be public, the committee does not want to disclose its tentative budget figures for the Long Lots project before bidding begins. Information regarding exactly how much the town might be willing to spend on a particular part of the project could skew the bids higher, he said.

“We would want the trades coming in to bid … to not have the exact price that we had budgeted for,” O’Day told the meeting. Similar executive sessions between the building committee and Board of Finance leaders were used successfully during the recent Coleytown Middle School reconstruction project, he added.

Few exemptions in the FOI regulations permit public building projects to be discussed in executive sessions, according to Russell Blair, director of education and communication for the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission.

Certain draft documents would be exempt from regulations governing executive sessions, he said, but budget documents would likely not qualify.

However, Nicholas Bamonte, an attorney with the Bercham Moses law firm contracted through the Town Attorney’s Office, said the executive sessions described by O’Day may be considered exempt to the open meetings law, qualifying either as discussions of a draft proposal, as negotiating sessions or as meetings that involve the bidding process.

Bamonte, who specializes in Freedom of Information law, added that he had not been contacted by town officials about the question and was not giving a definitive opinion in response to questions from the Westport Journal.

Freelance writer Gretchen Webster, a Fairfield County journalist for many years, was editor of the Fairfield Minuteman and has taught journalism at New York and Southern Connecticut State universities.

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