Estimates for PCB fix at GM high school top $20 million

By Shawn Cunningham
© 2025 Telegraph Publishing LLC

While officials at Green Mountain Union High School have reduced the amount of airborne PCBs to acceptable levels with air filtering, the long-term solution – as spelled out at last Thursday’s Green Mountain Unified School District board meeting will be more than $20 million and there’s no clear answer who would be footing the bill or if the work might even be done.

According to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation website, “Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are human-made chemicals that were used in building materials and electrical equipment before 1980. Examples of products that may contain PCBs include caulk, paint, glues, plastics, transformers, capacitors and fluorescent lighting ballasts.”

As caulks and other PCB containing substances deteriorate, the chemicals can be released as dust into the air according to the DEC.

Craig Sterritt, director of Environmental Services for John Turner Consulting, told the board his firm had evaluated the alternatives for correcting five areas of contamination. These include:

1. Removing contaminated caulk from windows, doors and ventilation louvers;
2. Removing caulking from expansion joints in walls;
3. Removing some of the school’s floor tiles and the adhesives that contain PCBs;
4. Encapsulating wall and floor paint throughout the building;
5. Removing or capping PCB contaminated soils around the building.

Sterritt said that his company had looked at the various options for dealing with each of the five areas and had identified and priced alternatives. In his presentation, Sterritt said there were 11 criteria against which the alternatives were evaluated. These included protection of human health, compliance with legal requirements, effectiveness and permanence, scheduling, cost and community acceptance.

The presentation included several matrices that showed how the consultants arrived at their recommended option for each of the five types of contamination, along with the estimated costs.

Sterritt then walked the board through the first matrix at length, explaining removing caulk from windows, doors etc. He said that removing what was easily reached and encapsulating the remainder might be cheaper, but would likely not be approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. By the same token, the more expensive solution would to remove all  PCBs by taking out the windows and doors as well as the bricks and concrete blocks they are connected to because those can absorb low levels of PCBs. But this procedure is more involved and difficult, taking 40 to 50 weeks during summer vacations which would mean a project lasting four to five years. That prompts  the question of how much remediation is necessary to make the building safe.

For dealing with contaminated caulk from windows, doors and ventilation louvers, Sterritt recommended Option 1b —  see the chart. He calls the reduction in PCBs from this option “good” and says that what’s left behind can be kept from moving by encapsulation. And Option 1b can be completed in 24 to 30 weeks but will require a 10-year “operations and maintenance” plan that will add $932,000 to the $7.8 million cost of the remediation.

After that detailed explanation, Sterritt moved quickly through the remaining four areas of contamination with his company’s recommendations. In total, the remediation work recommended by John Turner Consulting adds up to a bit more than $13 million with about additional expenditures of about $7.2 million over 10 years for mandated operations and maintenance plans.

You can see and hear the presentation at Okemo Valley TV but start at about the 15 minute mark. The zoom meeting had only audio except during Sterritt’s presentation.

Now what?

In several appropriations laws including Act 178 of 2022 and Act 78 of 2023, the state has committed to grants  in “an amount sufficient to pay for 100 percent of the school’s investigation, remediation, or removal costs.” But the funds for such projects have not been appropriated so far. And GM district voters turned down a renovation bond for a similar amount in 2022 for work on the district’s three schools. It’s questionable that they would spring for such a number for the high school alone.

Even if there were $20 million laying around to do the work, issues remain.

The push to get this done seems to be tied in part to an effort to be able to move 6th graders to the third floor of the high school to create a 6-7-8 grade middle school that would ease overcrowding at Chester-Andover Elementary. CAES is also attempting to ease overcrowding by working with FEMA for an addition.

But also moving 6th graders from Cavendish Elementary would reduce the population of that school and believe that would make Cavendish a target for closing.

Cavendish representatives on the board have expressed their opposition to the move in past meetings (See Op-ed: In defense of our sixth-graders), but the move is only possible if the administration can get the PCB levels down. This is because there are lower acceptable levels for K-6 than for 7-12.

TRSU Facilities Director Todd Parah told The Telegraph back in June, “We as the administration feel confident that our school has reached acceptable levels for the safety of our students and staff”  — still without sixth graders at the school.

And speaking of closing, another factor deciding how far to go toward remediation is the state’s movement toward large scale school district consolidation which will result in a number of schools closing. Whether GM would be viable in the decision making around restructuring with $20 million in remediation costs needed remains to be seen.

For now, the GM district has the cost numbers, but those are likely to increase with time.