Consultants from Tetra Tech presented the Cornwall Central School District’s 2025 building condition survey and told the board the district faces tens of millions of dollars in deferred needs.

Chris Schmidt, the firm’s facilities assessment specialist, said Tetra Tech’s team logged about 750 hours on the survey, inspected every building and uploaded the findings to the State Education Department portal. “When you take this home and you spend more time with this, you can know how this is working,” Schmidt said during the presentation.

The firm presented a multi-layered estimate that includes construction costs, contingencies and soft costs. Schmidt summarized the study’s highest-level totals as roughly $44.4 million of identified construction projects and about $65.6 million of work when design, contingency and incidental costs are added and escalated over time.

The report breaks costs down by building and by priority. The high school’s priority work was shown as about $7.5 million in current construction dollars — projected to total roughly $9 million when escalated — with major drivers including interior systems, electrical work, HVAC and site features. Other examples from the report included $360,000 of prioritized work at Cornwall Elementary, about $105,000 to replace a PA system elsewhere in the district, and identified projects at Willow Avenue and the central administration building totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

Board members asked whether items designated priority 1 could be further tiered. Schmidt said short-term sequencing and finer prioritization is best done by district staff, noting specifically that long-serving maintenance staff who know daily conditions would refine which priority-1 items are most urgent. A board member said the facilities committee will meet next week to reconcile the consultant findings with an internal list compiled over spring and summer.

District officials emphasized that no district typically has the resources to complete every identified project at once. The presentation framed the BCS as a planning tool: prioritization, schedule and a capital plan will be needed to translate the findings into specific projects.

Next steps discussed included a facilities-committee review, more detailed cost refinement and use of the consultant’s Excel workbook and dashboard to model escalation and timing. The consultant said the full report runs more than 100 pages and that the executive summary and underlying data will be available for district review.

The board did not take a formal vote on projects during the presentation; members endorsed further study and directed staff and the facilities committee to continue prioritization work and return recommended next steps to the full board.