The Scotts Valley School District has scheduled a groundbreaking ceremony for its new middle school, even though the project remained stalled this week by a Presidential order.
The long-awaited groundbreaking for the $40 million project will be at 4 p.m. Tuesday, May 9 at the Scotts Valley Middle School, Bean Creek Road.
Six days before that, at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, May 3, the newly hired construction team from Overaa Construction will unveil its plans for the phasing in of the two-year project and answer questions at a community forum at the Middle School pavilion, which will be razed and replaced at part of the project.Scotts Valley School Superintendent Tanya Krause reported to her board of trustees last month that just as the district was about to post its approved mitigation plan for the endangered Mount Hermon June Beetle, President Trump signed an executive order freezing all pending Environmental Protection Agency rules, including a freeze on all permits pending before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a sister agency in the Department of the Interior.
That stopped the district’s middle school reconstruction plan in its tracks, said Krause. “He [the President] put it on hold,” she said at the time. This week, she said the freeze is still in effect.
State officials have approved the project, but construction of the new middle school gym, scheduled to begin this summer, is still on hold.
The beetle, polyphylla barbata, is a little scarab whose only habitat in the world is Scotts Valley and the sandhills around the Zayante Creek watershed.
Krause had obtained final approvals of the district’s plan to ease the impact of the school construction project on the beetle habitat and only needed to post the plan and allow for a 30-day comment period before getting the green light from the state for the $40 million reconstruction project.The district had hoped to break ground for a new middle school gymnasium this summer, with a late 2018 completion date for the entire project.
