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MVSD
City of Mill Valley comments on MVSD Friends Field decision
At a Special Board meeting on February 26th, the Mill Valley School District's Board has reversed its decision to pursue development of a new Middle School on Friends Field at the Mill Valley Community Center and, instead, focus on the redevelopment of the school in its existing location. This decision was, in part, due to a comment letter by the City (See below).
In response to this, the City of Mill Valley issued the following " Message from Mayor Urban Carmel and City Manager Todd Cusimano Regarding Friends Field."
"At their Special Meeting last night, the Board of Trustees voted to eliminate Friends Field as an option and to proceed with further examination of the current site for potential construction of the Middle School.
"We wish to extend our sincere gratitude to the Board of Trustees for carefully considering the matter, all of the options, and making a difficult decision under challenging circumstances. We acknowledge the hard work and passion of the Board of Trustees, Superintendent Dr. Kaufman, District staff, and their consultant team. We deeply respect their dedication to the students of Mill Valley.
"We appreciate our longstanding partnership with the District, demonstrated by several key milestones of our over 70-year collaboration for the entire community's benefit. We emphasize that the use of Friends Field as a shared recreational resource is mandated by deed restrictions, voter actions, and decades of agreements. We encourage all community members to review the history to gain a comprehensive understanding of this complex issue.
"It is important to recognize that we all share a commitment to enhancing our community and supporting our children. Moving forward, we reaffirm our commitment to joint problem-solving with the District, a tradition of cooperation that has greatly benefited the community and made Mill Valley the beautiful and remarkable city that it is today.
"Finally, we wish to convey our sincere appreciation to the entire community for engaging in dialogue, seeking to understand all facets of the issue, offering valuable suggestions, and showing support. In particular, we are grateful to the Mill Valley Friends of Parks and Recreation for their decades of hard work and generosity in creating and maintaining our City’s parks and recreation facilities; no other organization is so widely held in high regard by our community.
"Looking ahead, by working together, we can seize this opportunity to create a shared recreational and educational space that we can all take pride in for decades to come."
City of Mill Valley Comment Letter on Legal Issues:
The City of Mill Valley sent the following legal comment letter to the MVSD Citizens' Bond Oversight Committee prior to the MVSD Board meeting on the 26th. Here is the introduction to that letter, which can be read in its entirely using the link below.
February 26, 2024
To: Chair Peters and Members of the Measure G Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee Mill Valley School District
Re: Proposed Middle School Rehabilitation - Potential Use of Friends Field
The City of Mill Valley (the “City”) seeks to work collaboratively with the Mill Valley School District (the “District”) to find a solution to the District’s need to upgrade and renovate the classrooms at Mill Valley Middle School (“Middle School”). The City and the District have more than a 70 year history of working collaboratively and in partnership or the betterment of all of Mill Valley.
We want to be very clear, however: The City is strongly opposed to the conversion of any portion of Friends Field into classroom use to accomplish that goal.
The continued use of Friends Field as a joint use recreational resource is bound up and required by the language of deed restrictions, the actions of the voters of the City, and 56 years of agreements between the City and the District, all of which consistently contemplate and require that Friends Field is to be joint use recreational playfield.
Any unilateral change in the use of Friends Field by the District would violate these restrictions and agreements and undermine the legal basis for the District to operate the Middle School on its current site.
The CBOC is duty-bound to ensure that bond funds are expended in the fashion outlined in the District's bond resolution. It is imperative that the CBOC understand the legal requirements and limitations on the use of the District’s Middle School property, while also considering whether further pursuit of the District's proposal to develop Friends Field with classrooms aligns with the intent of the voters. While we agree that the District, in fulfilling its fiduciary duty, must explore all viable options for Middle School renovation, the District must also responsibly allocate Measure G funds.
The CBOC must examine if the District is utilizing taxpayer dollars for development proposals contrary to legal restrictions imposed by state law, voter action and decades of binding agreements between the City and the District. Persisting with the proposal to build classrooms on Friends Field in contravention of state law, voter-imposed restrictions and the terms of prior agreements with the City, will lead to significant delays, continued public controversy, adversarial relations with the City, legal challenges to the District’s actions, and ultimately result in the waste of Measure G funds.
In addition, as we are sure the CBOC is aware, Friends Field is an extremely valuable asset to the entire community, not just middle school or District students. The playfields are used by hundreds of people each month. In addition, the City’s community center building and associated facilities are located immediately adjacent to Friends Field and that adjacency creates synergy, efficiencies and coordination between the community’s uses. The intent and benefits of this adjacency have been a well-understood goal and feature in the decades of planning and expenses incurred by the City and private donors in building the community center building at its current site, determining the orientation of the City’s buildings on that site and then designing and paying for the reorientation and development of Friends Field into its current configuration.
Development of Friends Field into classrooms or relocating the current uses of Friends Field somewhere else on District property or elsewhere in the City would not only contradict long-standing agreements between the City and the District but also significantly and permanently impair the benefits of having those recreational resources located adjacent to each other.
The City seeks to collaborate with the District to preserve Friends Field in its current configuration and with its current shared use, while achieving necessary upgrades to the Middle School. In furtherance of this aim, the City wants to make sure that the District and the CBOC are aware of the history of the property and the several legal limitations on its use and development.