NORTHAMPTON — A five-day delay by the City Council in appropriating money needed to put solar photovoltaics on the Ryan Road Elementary School roof could change the price and size of the system and potentially reduce the benefits to the school budget, according to the director of the city’s Climate Action and Project Administration.
As a continuing fallout from the charter objections used last month to postpone votes on more than $11.5 million in financial orders for three renewable-energy projects at city schools, Northampton officials missed the Dec. 31 tax-credit deadline for getting a contract in place to build out the solar array at the Ryan Road school.
“We did not make that deadline, which means that the project may either cost more or be designed differently, because we are going to have to use different modules to get the full tax credit,” CAPA Director Ben Weil told the Energy & Sustainability Commission at its meeting Jan. 13.
The financial order for the project called for investing $455,763 in the photovoltaics to secure a federal investment tax credit of $136,279 “if contracted and some materials are ordered before the last day of calendar year 2025.” The after-tax-credit investment cost would be $319,484 and would have an internal rate of return greater than 17% and a simple payback period of just over five years.
But along with the geothermal heating system at Northampton High School and a solar-generating parking lot canopy for Jackson Street Elementary School, the appropriations from the city’s Climate Stabilization Fund were postponed from Dec. 4 to Dec. 9, when then-Ward 3 Councilor Quaverly Rothenberg used councilor objections. Rothenberg explained her reasoning for delaying as being prompted over a concern about the perceived lack of transparency on the city’s plans for potential consolidation of the district’s elementary schools.
“I cannot, in good conscience, approve these things where there is, not even so little transparency, the opposite of transparency, around whether you’re still planning school consolidations,” Rothenberg said at that meeting. “You won’t even let me ask a question about school consolidation.”
Weil added more details at the commission meeting about the situation regarding the Ryan Road project. The five-day delay meant that on New Year’s Eve, as First Night was being celebrated around downtown, Weil was working with lawyers to make changes to the contract, which, when complete, would have allowed Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra to “docu-sign” it. Weil said Sciarra was checking her email regularly that afternoon and evening for the final contract.
“We missed that deadline,” Weil said. “We were working really, really hard, but every minute of delay was a problem.”
The Ryan Road project could support 180.2 kilowatts of photovoltaics to produce 186.6 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, with an estimated average net operating income of $63,318 per year for the public schools, and an approximate $1.58 million in combined savings and revenue over the 25-year life of the array, according to the financial order.
By not getting in by the end of the year, there are more restraints on the type of photovoltaic modules that can be used. A final contract will not be in place until the system is redesigned and modules that qualify are identified.
“We think that it’s going to be the same price and roughly the same size,” Weil said. “We may actually get a larger tax credit to the degree it’s U.S.-manufactured panels, but we may have to pay more to get there.”
Weil said this week that it remains unknown how the project is affected.
“We have still not determined the final price and size,” Weil said. “We hope that it remains the same. We need to use different panels which have different characteristics and costs.”
“There are a lot of variables, and we are working on completely redesigning the system to maximize our tax rebate such that the final cost to the city is the same or better,” Weil added. “We are under less pressure now because our new deadline is to order materials before July 4.”
Weil said the Dec. 31 deadline was always going to be tight, but this would have been made for “safe-harboring the project” as originally planned if not for the delay caused by the charter objections.
He points to an irony that Rothenberg’s concerns now have real-world consequences.
“It cost us at least two weeks’ worth of staff time, may cost us additional taxpayer dollars in final costs, and/ or might reduce the benefit to the school operating budget — the very issue with which this city councilor most publicly associated herself,” Weil said.
Rothenberg disputes that her use of the charter objection had any impact on what has since occurred.
“Charter objections delay votes by two business days,” Rothenberg said. “Any additional time they took was their choice or their incompetence.”
She observes that running out of time while trying to negotiate the terms of the contract suggests the executive branch made misrepresentations about the deal.
“I repeatedly asked for a contract and raised concerns about particular boilerplate terms I’d expect to see in there, and they refused to provide one and said that they’d seen the template and everything was fine,” Rothenberg said. “If everything was fine they wouldn’t have needed more time to negotiate it.”
The three projects are being pursued to meet the goal of getting Northampton to being a net-carbon-neutral city by 2050, with net-carbon-neutral municipal operations by 2030.
At Jackson Street, the city will enter into a power purchase agreement for a solar canopy over the parking lot. The company handling that was able to get in under the same year-end deadline and secure the less expensive panels.
At the high school, a contract could be ready by March, with applications for grants to reduce the costs of the short- and long-term bonding and increase tax investment credit.
Weil explained that he is coordinating with schools on logistics, and if all goes according to plan, a test well for the geothermal would be done in the spring and the project would be under construction over the summer, with a likelihood that summer school would need to be moved.
At least one-third of the parking will be impacted during construction. “Parking is going to be the big logistical problem at the high school,” Weil said.