By Kathianne Boniello
The city Board of Education came up with a plan to close the school construction budget gap last month, but the amended proposal has not halted an audit to find out exactly how the $2.3 billion shortfall happened.
Queens Board of Ed rep Terri Thomson said last week auditors have been going through records at the Long Island City-based School Construction Authority to determine what went wrong in the five-year construction budget plan.
“They have been poring through the files,” Thomson said in a telephone interview. The audit, which Thomson requested after the budget gap became public in June, was expected to be finished in a month or two, she said.
The current five-year capital plan was adopted in May 1999 and includes school construction and repair projects from 2000 to 2004. The school construction budget debacle has dragged on since June when it was first made public that the city had run out of funds in the second year of the plan. The school construction budget gap has been estimated at $2.3 billion.
Queens, the borough with the most overcrowded classrooms in the city and with the most schools in need of repairs, was especially hard hit by the news. Because the school construction budget was dominated by proposed Queens projects the borough stood to lose the most when the Board of Ed tried to close the budget gap.
Nearly six months later the seven-member board sat down with Schools Chancellor Harold Levy to decide which school projects would continue and those that would be dropped at a special December meeting.
The board voted to postpone construction of only five Queens schools to make ends meet, giving the city’s most overcrowded classrooms a quasi-victory. Of the original 19 school construction projects in the borough, 14 were slated to go forward in the revised budget.
Thomson said the revised school construction budget, approved in a 4-3 vote last month, puts students first.
“We did it in a way that meets the needs of the children,” she said. “The neediest children got the schools.”
One of the significant results of the ongoing audit, she said, would be the recommendations auditors from KPMG, an accounting firm often used by the board, are expected to make.
Thomson said understanding how the construction budget went awry would be an important step toward preventing similar errors in the future.
Reach reporter Kathianne Boniello by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 146.
