Developer’s confidential proposal roils James City County board

JAMES CITY — A politically connected developer quietly floated a confidential proposal to partner with James City County in a $30 million-plus deal to build a new middle school – but left some of the elected officials who would have to come up with money, and the public at large, in the dark.

Word of the proposal only leaked out several days after developer Chris Henderson tipped James City County Board Chairwoman Mary Jones and Supervisors Michael Hipple and Kevin Onizuk about his plan in an email labeled “highly confidential.”

Jones, Hipple and Onizuk — three closely allied Republicans — constitute a majority on the five-member Board of Supervisors and could theoretically approve the deal by themselves.

In the email, obtained by the Daily Press Media Group, Henderson said he had assembled a team including Ritchie Curbow Construction and the engineering firm AES that proposed to build a school for $32 million on a James City County site known as the Warburton Tract, a 180-acre parcel once envisioned as a hub of workforce housing and eldercare.

“Should this be something you would like for me to pursue, I need to hear from you,” Henderson wrote. “My team has already spent considerable time, money and effort.”

Public-private partnerships allow private investors to build and either sell or lease facilities ranging from schools to highways to a government. The idea is that governments can save scarce taxpayer resources while investors get a chance to earn a profit, although some recent efforts, such as the state’s partnership with a private consortium for a replacement for U.S. 460, don’t always work out that way.

“When you’ve got someone proposing a [public-private partnership] who’s tied to the Republican Party, which is a majority on the Board of Supervisors, which has the potential to be very profitable for him and possibly a good deal for the county, it shouldn’t be done in the dark. You’re going to have people asking what’s going on,” said board member Jim Kennedy, a former Republican who with Democrat John McGlennon has been a minority voice on the five-member board.

“It’s very apparent that we’ve been excluded from decision-making,” he said.

‘Followed protocol’

Henderson, who is a senior vice president at the commercial real estate firm CBRE, said he was disappointed that some board members felt left out by his email, but added that he “followed protocol” by telling the supervisor, Onizuk, who represents the district where the proposed school would be built, as well as the board chair, Jones, and vice chair, Hipple.

The Public-Private Education Facilities and Infrastructure Act, which authorizes localities to form the partnerships, says proposals like Henderson’s may be invited or they may come in unsolicited. “In either case,” the law says, “proposers must follow a two-part submission process consisting of an initial Conceptual Stage … and, after approval of the conceptual stage, a Detailed Stage.”

Onizuk said he forwarded Henderson’s email to all other board members shortly after receiving it, noting that “outside of expanding the current middle schools, this is probably the only option I’ve seen that seems to make sense.”

“All he said was he had heard from a developer and it sounded like a good idea,” McGlennon said. “He didn’t say it was a developer with a long history of political activity and campaign contributions.”

Henderson has given $25,595 to political candidates and associations over the past 12 years, almost all of them Republican and most of them based in James City County.

McGlennon said he felt it was wrong for individual board members to be involved in discussing deals with developers, since it can mean committing a local government to a deal without a full airing in public.

And, while Onizuk said Henderson’s email was meant to be a heads up about an idea that really didn’t involve the supervisors, McGlennon disagreed.

“He was asking three members to confirm support because he’d already spent a lot of money,” McGlennon said.

Jones said she had no opinion on the proposal because she had not had a chance to review it, adding that the board wouldn’t do anything in any event until it had a request from the school board.

“I don’t have any control over who is copied on an email,” she added. “We try very hard to keep everyone in the loop.”

Hipple was not immediately available for comment.

Public-private partnership

According to Williamsburg-James City County Schools Superintendent Steven Constantino, a public-private partnership would have to be brokered by the school division, which develops and evaluates school programs and facilities, along with the county and city, which fund the schools and have the ability to acquire land.

But according to James City County Administrator Bryan Hill, the public-private partnership in question would need to be an agreement between the proposal’s developer and the school division itself because the county “has not been asked to buy land anywhere, so we would not be a part of it.”

Although he said he met with Henderson on Tuesday, Hill said he has not been asked by the Board of Supervisors to look into Henderson’s proposal.

“I would not look into this until (the supervisors) brought this forward in open session, and that has not happened,” Hill said.

Henderson said he began putting together a partnership two weeks ago, after seeing that the Williamsburg-James City County School Board was considering a proposal of more than $50 million for a phased-in construction of a new middle school first for 600 students and later expanded for 900 students at the James Blair facility.

“That just didn’t make sense to me,” Henderson said, since the James City supervisors had earlier rejected a less costly proposal to build a smaller school at the site.

Constantino said Wednesday that Henderson had mentioned the Warburton site last spring during a brief conversation about potential middle school options.

“I don’t recall the whole conversation … but I said you’ve got to work with the county. The school board does not have the authority to purchase or acquire land,” said Constantino, who said he received an email on Friday, Oct. 17, from Henderson about building a middle school at Warburton.

“In fairness to Mr. Henderson, and in fairness to everyone, there have been so many conversations about land,” Constantino added.

Henderson said his proposal would be for a 650-student school that could be open in August 2017.

Proposed plan

The school administration’s own construction plan calls for a school for 600 students to open in 2018-19 on a site already publicly owned: the James Blair facility, which formerly served as a high school, then as a middle school, and in 2010 was shuttered as a school and transformed into the division’s central offices. The school administration’s plan called for the school to share the site with the offices until extra space for more students was needed, at which point the offices would be demolished to expand the school’s capacity to 900. The school board approved that plan Tuesday by a 6-1 vote.

In his email to the three supervisors, Henderson said he was working with heirs to the Warburton family, across from the gated Ford’s Colony neighborhood, and said the family was agreeable to the sale but wanted the Board of Supervisors to approve a master plan for what he described as 115 developable acres, to include single family houses surrounding a school.

Henderson said later that there were other sites on which a public-private partnership could build a school. He said access to the Warburton site was not what drove the idea, and said he expected the school project to be profitable on its own, and did not require development on adjacent land to make sense.

He said he did not want to comment on how far along the proposal was because he did not want to give a lead to possible competitors.

The state law governing public-private partnerships sets a multi-step process for handling proposals that a government body did not seek, including disclosure of the proposal and opening an opportunity for others to make their own proposals before any decision about proceeding. The act and guidelines by the state Division of Legislative Services do not set specific rules about communications before a proposal is formally presented.

But communications about a proposal before it is made “is frowned on,” said Amigo R. Wade, the division staff member who runs the PPEA Working Group.

Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, said communications like Henderson’s email raised a basic question: “Does the public want its elected officials not to work together?”

Ress can be reached by telephone at 757-247-4535. Sampson can be reached by telephone at 757-345-2345.