Mayor Matt Driscoll is working very hard to encourage packed houses at the four city high school auditoriums for the Joint Schools Construction Board’s public meetings to discuss the seven schools that will be renovated during the first phase of the school reconstruction project and the School District’s Comprehensive Plan.

The first phase, is budgeted at almost $225 million, with amounts ranging from $51.7 million for Fowler High to $22 million for Shea Middle and includes appropriations for the Institute of Technology {Central Tech}, Blodgett and HW Smith Pre K-8, Clary Middle and Dr. Weeks Elementary. The meetings are scheduled:

Thursday, Sept. 14 at

Fowler High School

Monday, Sept. 18 at

Henninger High School

Tuesday, Sept. 19 at

Nottingham High School

Thursday, Sept. 21 at

Corcoran High School

All meetings will be held from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.

“The average age of our school buildings is 68 years old,” Driscoll notes. “We have to be planning for the next 30 years. We want to be very careful and plan for all the details, especially the Minority & Women Business Enterprise percentages. We have to make sure we’re hiring people from the city.” Driscoll says the nine-member JSCB panel is going line by line over the enabling legislation Gov. George Pataki finally signed, two years after Driscoll submitted legislation for renovation of the city’s 35 schools at an estimated cost of $600 million.

“We had support from both sides of the aisle [in Albany],” Driscoll says. “When [Pataki] vetoed it we were caught off guard.” Insiders speculate that the mayor should not have been surprised by the veto with his campaign for reelection imminent. If the funding were approved before Democrat Driscoll faced the voters, he could have campaigned on his ability to bring home the bricks and mortar. By delaying approval until after the election, Republican Pataki could pocket an owesey from a Republican mayor, if victorious, and cash it in for his quest of the 2008 presidential nomination. Releasing it to a GOP administration would have given local Republicans control of the dispersement of $600 million in construction contracts.

According to Driscoll, escalating costs in the intervening two years have driven the original figure up to $926,292,000.

“That’s a billion dollars,” Stanley Dean observes with some awe. A graduate of the Labor Relations program at LeMoyne College and former member of Local 267 as a steam fitter who worked mostly on nuclear power plants, Dean is regional representative of the national Associated Builders and Contractors, which represents merit contractors advocating open shops on construction projects so that workers can be hired whether they belong to unions or not.

“Driscoll says this could change the complexion of economic opportunity in the city, and it could, Dean affirms. “But he wants to give it to the unions. We know what the unions did for him. This is quid pro quo.” Dean, who is also City Chair for the local Republican party maintains that union members from out of town imported to get out the vote on election day provided Driscoll’s slim margin of victory in his bid for reelection last year.

“There’s no such thing as non-union,” Dean insists. “The unions use that to engage in philosophical debates. This is not philosophical. It’s about opportunity, especially in the city.” An African-American, Dean grew up in Syracuse at a time when local apprenticeship programs, and consequently union membership, was not open to blacks. “We don’t have the master plumbers, the HVAC people now, because we didn’t have them then,” he says, describing a tradition which has created a self-fulfilling prophesy when calls for opportunities for untrained local workers are met with demands for qualified applicants. Dean will be recruiting people to attend the public meetings to advocate the ABC’s position.

“That’s a billion dollars,” echoes Board of Education member Calvin Corriders, who serves as treasurer on the JSC Board. “It’s a huge concern,” he responds to Dean’s fear that residents of the local communities of color will be shut out of the job opportunities created by the school renovation program. “I grew up in Central Village,” Corriders says. “I want everyone to eat. But as a banker, I have seen how ‘minority contractors’ who are minority in name only, can outbid the small black contractors who may not be able to finance the insurance requirements or the start up materials needed while waiting for reimbursement.”

Corriders relates that a major topic of the JSCB meetings has been how to keep the job opportunities created by the state funding open to all potential workers in the city, and hopes for a large turnout at the public meetings with people bringing suggestions for achieving that goal. “But, I assure you that non-union labor will be employed on this project,” he insists. “The C. Newton’s [small black contractors] will be able to bid on these contracts, perhaps with larger companies. This is a billion dollars, and we have to make sure it stays in the city.”

Driscoll is hoping for a large turnout for a different reason. “There has been a lot of misinformation on this project,” he observes. “These meetings are a chance to explain the things people don’t understand, like the delay in getting started on Central Tech. The design work is all complete, but if we had started it without this package we would have had to borrow $43 million, with the payback being born by the taxpayers of the city.”

As chair of the public meetings, Driscoll reflects that individual input can actually have an impact on public policy. “There’s no bad ideas,” he says. “We’re limited only by what’s realistic financially and issues of law. As City Council President I chaired the biggest public meeting in history, the first one on Destiny in 2000. I had to handle it very . . . firmly.” Given the intensity of concerns surrounding this project, the Mayor may have to dust off his firmness hat if he expects to contain the articulations of a range of issues within one orderly hour.