The Saugus Union School District asset management advisory committee met last week to discuss and review sample recommendation reports for the site of Santa Clarita Elementary School.
Committee members focused on making an outline for the first draft recommendation report to give structure to how they would like the report laid out.
Sarine Abrahamian, an attorney with Orbach, Huff & Henderson, said she put together a presentation of several examples of how other school districts’ asset management advisory committees constructed their recommendations for alternatives to surplus.
She said that each district is unique and that is why the language between each recommendation is different and why it would be different for them. The goal was to start getting familiar with the language used in the report.
The committee’s rough outline included the statements: “Don’t use it for residential purposes” and “Don’t use it for commercial purposes” on the very top.
Committee Chairman James Shea suggested the statements be above the recommendations to be transparent about what the committee highly recommend the property is not used for — and to show that it should be a separate clause from the others.
The committee members agreed that the recommendation for how the site should be used should include:
- Consider a partnership with local public agencies or nonprofit entities.
- To benefit children and the community (i.e. arts, library, community center, educational use, park expansion and improvements, or recreational fields).
- Maintain the look and feel of the mid-century modern look of the site, including the landscaping.
- Recommend that the board act as expeditiously as possible, so the property doesn’t sit vacant.
Abrahamian said she was going to take the rough outline and apply it to the template for the recommendation report to bring back to the committee at the next meeting.
The next asset management advisory committee meeting is scheduled April 2, when the committee will go over the language of the report and make any changes if needed so that in the following meeting after that the committee can present it to the public for input and make changes if necessary.
“The goal of the next meeting is for this committee to approve the language that you (Abrahamian) draft and take it to the community,” said committee member Bob Aholt. “We get community feedback and after we get the community feedback, we’ll incorporate it or not if we don’t need to, we’ll finalize the document and that it goes to the board.”
