Our Oct. 31 deadline to commence our high school building project has passed and our project has been on hold since Sept. 11 when the Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) denied the issuance of the district’s conditional use permit. Now that our deadline has passed with no settlement agreement in sight, the school district was left with a decision about how to move forward.
If you refer to my Oct. 29 communication to families, I shared that some of us attended a nearly four-hour City Council Meeting and, in the end, the Council did not vote upon our settlement agreement and no follow up meeting date regarding the LH matter was scheduled. Therefore, the LH Board needed to make a decision about how to move forward with the project and to try and salvage the construction schedule that is now over two months behind due to the BZA’s actions denying our permit (the first BZA Hearing was Aug. 14, 2018).
Although it was initially expected we would have reached a settlement with the City of Pataskala, we deployed an alternate strategy to move the building project forward. Therefore, on Tues., the LH Board of Education unanimously approved a resolution to proceed forward with the construction of our new high school without a conditional use permit. As we have made a “reasonable attempt” to comply with local zoning restrictions, our district has the ability to commence the construction project based upon the court case Brownfield v. State (1980,) which still applies today.
Please read the letter below for more information.