Now that the Kalispell school district has moved forward with plans to purchase land for a future school site, it is up to elementary district voters to approve the acquisition on the Nov. 4 general election ballot.

The district will use existing money in an interlocal fund and an elementary miscellaneous programs fund for the land purchase. Kalispell Public Schools Superintendent Mark Flatau emphasized this is not a request for money from taxpayers and will not affect tax rates.

If approved by voters, the transaction will involve a property exchange. Initially, the school district will buy land owned by Walter Stoller, then swap it for an adjacent piece of property owned by Sam and Julie Baldridge. The land parcels, located south of Kalispell along Airport Road (southeast of the Ashley Park Subdivision), are each roughly 25 acres.

When the deal is completed, the property transaction will not exceed $420,000. The district will buy the Stoller property for approximately $385,000. Conditions of the property swap include a $25,000 cash payment to Baldridge, annexation into the city and rezoning from agricultural to a zone that accommodates public uses.

The Baldridge property is large enough to potentially build an elementary and middle school. Flatau noted that parcels of this size are difficult to find within district boundaries.

“So why is additional land needed?” Flatau asked during a meeting at Edgerton Elementary School on Friday. “Well, we’re growing. We’ve grown in the elementary district in the last 10 years by 22 percent, or 541 students.”

The district has been searching for properties for several months to plan ahead for continued growth at the elementary level. It didn’t take long for classroom additions completed at Peterson and Edgerton to reach capacity at the start of the 2013-14 school year. Each school had four classrooms built. Currently, Flatau said new children enrolled in the district cannot be guaranteed placement at their neighborhood schools in some grade levels because of overcrowding. He used kindergarten as an example. 

“Edgerton is the only elementary with room in their kindergarten right now,” Flatau said.

Some elementary schools also have created “super-sized” classrooms with between 30 to 35 students team-taught by two teachers to accommodate enrollment increases.

“If we don’t act now then we really feel that we’re not being responsible in regards to looking down the road for our long-term growth,” Flatau said.

Kalispell Planning Director Tom Jentz, who also attended the meeting, said if a school was built, development would take off south of town.

“We’ve already been contacted by the remaining private properties out there about what’s the potential for residential development; what’s the potential for annexation; and we said ‘really good’; and that’s really what we want to see out there. We did not want that to become a commercial center. We did not want to see it become an industrial area.”

The reason the district is swapping properties is primarily due to timing, asking prices and development costs.

In March, the district initially made an offer on the property now owned by the Baldridges, when it came on the market for its appraised value of $420,000. The district’s offer wasn’t accepted, however, and the property was bought by the Baldridges.

Although the Baldridge property hadn’t been listed on the market, the owners were willing to sell it to the district at an asking price above the appraised value. The adjacent Stoller property, however, was on the market for $420,000, but the concern was that it would be cost-prohibitive to build infrastructure through the Baldridge property to reach the Stoller property. All parties eventually reached a compromise with the property exchange in August.

If voters do not approve the land acquisition, the agreement will be null and void. 

Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or by email at hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.