LIVERMORE — Spruce Mountain Primary School needs new roofs and a new heating system, which together could cost $1.6 million.
The Spruce Mountain School District, also known as Regional School Unit 73, has decided to move forward with the projects now to avoid higher construction costs later.
The good news for students, staff members and taxpayers in Jay, Livermore and Livermore Falls is that about half of the district’s major building projects can be funded with little more than the stroke of a pen.
And the other half could be covered by issuing a new bond once the current one expires. That would likely keep the debt‑retirement tax rate in place for another 20 years, but it would also help avoid raising taxes for the second project.
Completing both halves would please Superintendent Scott Albert and Maintenance Director Wayne Neil.
“I’m retiring in two years (2028),” Albert said Tuesday in an interview at the district office. “I would like to leave the district in the best shape possible.”
Both projects are at Spruce Mountain Primary School on Gibbs Mill Road in Livermore. One involves replacing the roofs; the other replaces oil‑burning boilers with a propane system. Each is expected to cost between $700,000 and $800,000.
The primary school, which serves pupils from prekindergarten through second grade, has two roofs. The original building, built in 1988, has a flat roof covered with a rubber membrane. A wing added in 2000 has a pitched roof with asphalt shingles that remain in place.
According to Roof Hub, a Boston roofing contractor, rubber membranes can last 40 years or more. Neil said Maine’s harsher climate can significantly shorten that lifespan. The primary school’s roof is now 37 years old, and he added that the shingles on the 2000 addition are “brittle and losing their asphalt.”
How will RSU 73 pay the $760,731 cost of new roofs?
Albert said the district’s capital reserve account holds $200,000. He added that officials plan to ask for a vote at the budget meeting to transfer $570,000 in carryover funds into the reserve.
In other words, no new money.
If all goes well, the primary school’s boiler system will also be converted to propane with “no new money.” By the end of the 2026‑27 school year, the district expects to have retired the bond that financed reroofing the high school.
The money raised to pay off that loan could continue to be collected each year, keeping debt‑retirement spending steady rather than dropping when bonds are paid off or spiking when a new bond is sold before an old one is retired.
The project, estimated at $700,000 to $800,000, would buy four propane‑burning boilers to replace three oil units. The boilers are nearing the end of their life expectancy. Those at the primary school in Livermore date from 2007 and 2008. In 2023, RSU 73 had to replace two cracked sections in the main boiler.
By converting to propane, Neil said, the district can improve efficiency and air quality. Propane burns more cleanly than oil.
At the same time, the district can bury the propane tanks — the oil tanks are above ground — and avoid the need for vaporizers that keep fuel burnable.
Neil said vaporizers cost about $27,000 each, while burying the three propane tanks would cost about $21,000. Because underground temperatures in winter are warmer than outdoor air, the propane vapor the boilers burn does not revert to liquid as above‑ground oil does.
RSU 73 wants to undertake these projects as soon as possible because both roofs and boilers are nearing the end of their service life.
“We don’t want to go through what Rumford and Oxford Hills went through,” Neil said.
Regional School Unit 10 had to close the Rumford‑Mexico Middle School, shift to remote learning and then find temporary classrooms while a new middle school was built. One reason was air quality.
In 2024, Oxford Hills — Maine School Administrative District 17 — closed the Agnes Gray Elementary School in West Paris because of deficiencies deemed too costly to fix.
Albert and Neil said construction costs are rising so quickly that delaying needed projects will make them more expensive in the long run.
A Maine Monitor analysis of state data from September 2024 confirms their concern. School construction costs rose to $661 a square foot in 2024, up from $270 in 2015. Put another way, Oxford Hills paid $23,358 per student to build Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in 1994. RSU 10 spent $88,784 per student in 2022 to build Rumford Elementary School.
Costs are so high that only two schools received state construction funding this year — in Bath and Frenchville — and both had been heavily damaged by fire. Replacement and remodeling costs are climbing at nearly the same pace as new construction.
