Lehighton Area School District could be on the hook financially for installation and lifetime maintenance of a traffic signal at Ninth and Bridge Streets if it hopes to get an occupancy permit for its elementary center, which opened in 2018.

The occupancy permit will be one item up for discussion Monday night when the school board holds a special meeting at 7 p.m.

In a meeting on Tuesday night, the board said Lehighton Borough drafted an agreement, calling for the district to pay for the light. The matter was tabled to give district solicitor, Eric Filer, additional time to review the agreement.

“I wouldn’t want to see us vote on something tonight that obligates us to a $400,000 bill from the borough because they are going to construct a traffic light,” LASD Business Manager Edward Rarick said on Tuesday. “The district’s original traffic study, when the elementary center was being built, showed there was not a need for that signal.”

Director David Bradley, however, urged the board to do whatever it takes to get the occupancy permit as soon as possible, even if it meant approving the agreement on the spot.

“It is almost three years after the expiration of our temporary certificate of occupancy,” Bradley said. “I want us to be lawful and have an occupancy permit, so we can occupy a $34 million building that has kids in it without an occupancy permit.”

Filer said the district has every right to occupy the building because the borough’s code enforcement officer is not enforcing the permit while the two sides try to come to an agreement.

In a meeting earlier this year, the district said the borough notified it that they wanted everything closed out for the permit by the end of the year.

“The agreement we received from the borough on Monday has the district depositing at least $10,000 in an escrow account, which could be drawn on for invoices.”

LASD Superintendent Jonathan Cleaver said all life and safety items for the elementary center have been reviewed and approved.

“The rest is paperwork,” Cleaver said, “and our insurance company has indicated they are not concerned with any liability on our end, because the life and safety items have been approved.”

District bank account

Monday’s meeting has several other agenda items, including a motion for the district to open a new general fund account with Mauch Chunk Trust Co. after Bradley posted a check on a YouTube video, showing the district’s routing and bank account numbers.

“The district would like to replace this account in order to proactively prevent any future fraudulent activity,” the motion states.

The district made out the check to Bradley for $11.50 as a reimbursement after he won a Pa. Office of Open Records appeal challenging how much the district could charge him for copies of information sought in a Right To Know request.

Bradley requested all records evidencing application of the district’s Facilities and Workplace Safety policy in 2020, which yielded 52 pages of results. The OOR, however, determined he could only be charged for the pages that required the district to print them out, so it could redact protected information.

A similar situation happened in Carbon County last month when Commissioner Chris Lukasevich posted a photo of a county-issued check on the Carbon County Commissioners’ Facebook page, complete with all financial information that wasn’t redacted.

Lukasevich later apologized for an “error in judgment.”

Director’s concerns

Under the “Director’s Concerns” portion of Monday’s LASD agenda, director Barbara Bowes requested the following motions be included:

• Termination of the Filer and Schwab law firm as district solicitor effective at the end of Monday’s meeting.

• Appointing Fox Rothschild LLP as district solicitor subject to a blended hourly rate of $250 per hour for base services and $300 per hour for special services.

• Removal of Larry Stern as board president to be replaced by Joy Beers until the December reorganization meeting.

• Appointment of an committee consisting of two board members of Beers’ choice to transition legal services, review the solicitor’s requirements for meeting attendance, meeting scheduling, the specifics of the services to be provided, effectively coordinate the services with the law firm of King Spry, and all other issues involving the Fox Rothschild LLP transition.

• Empower Fox Rothschild to investigate the legal validity of the superintendent’s contract status. LASD extended Cleaver in June through 2023-24. Per the terms of the extension, he will receive a 2% raise each year of the pact, making his base salary for the 2021-22 school year $147,900. He will then be set to make $150,858 in 2022-23 and $153,875 in 2023-24.