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No New Taxes, Mayor, Council Tell School Board: City officials are asking McKeesport Area School District not to raise taxes to fund the construction of two new elementary schools.

The city enthusiastically supports construction of a new school next to the current Cornell Intermediate School (the former McKeesport Technical High School), Brewster said Wednesday, and will help the district improve the site in any way possible.

That could include repairing Spring Avenue, which connects Cornell Street with Jenny Lind Street and Walnut Street. The street, which is routinely washed out by several natural springs, has long been an obstacle course for city motorists.

"But I will add to my comment that I am opposed to doing it with any tax increase," Brewster said. Although the city is under financial strain, he said, council has found ways to pay its bills without raising taxes.

"The taxpayers rely on us to find a way to make that happen," Brewster said.

He and City Controller Ray Malinchak also urged MASD to build the first new school within the city limits, saying that Cornell, built in 1916, is more urgently in need of replacement than either of the schools in White Oak.

However, Brewster was careful not to criticize the neighboring borough, one of five in the McKeesport Area School District. The mayor said he had no desire to reopen the controversy that resulted in March, when the Post-Gazette reported that White Oak officials had considered seceding from the district or petitioning to change the district's name.

"As McKeesport goes or White Oak goes, so do the rest of our communities go," Brewster said. "All five of us have to work together, and now is the time for us to circle the wagons. The communities that circle the wagons and work together are the strongest, and have the loudest voice in Harrisburg or Washington."

Community activist and educator Major Mason III noted that building a new school on the Cornell site will benefit the surrounding neighborhoods, and would probably lead to increased usage of nearby assets like the Carnegie Library of McKeesport and the McKeesport Little Theater.

The new school will also allow MASD to offer new programs in areas like conflict resolution and anger management, he said. "There's new research out there that suggests that if you teach kids when they're young, they won't be out there stabbing each other and fighting when they're 17," Mason said.

More than 560 people have signed a petition asking MASD to build its next new school on the Cornell site, he said.

Malinchak questioned whether MASD really needs to build two new schools, since population projections by the state Department of Education predict that MASD will decline from 3,900 students this academic year to 3,400 five years from now.

Borrowing $31 million, Malinchak said, will cost the district about $1.2 million per year.

"Tell me how they're going to make that up without raising taxes," he said. "In a couple of years, the people of this district are going to be looking back and wondering how that happened."

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City Joins West-to-West: The city will join the Duquesne-based West-to-West Coalition.

At Wednesday's meeting, council by 5-0 vote approved membership in the league of Mon Valley area municipalities, which was designed to include --- as its name implies --- all of the communities between West Homestead and West Elizabeth. West-to-West provides member municipalities with assistance in completing environmental remediation of abandoned industrial sites, or so-called "brownfields."

Mayor Jim Brewster had previously said the city had no need for West-to-West, because the city has its own community development department.

However, West-to-West can also provide access to funding that would otherwise be difficult for the city to obtain.

Brewster said Wednesday night that the first project that West-to-West will work on in the city is the remediation of the former Amoco station on Eden Park Boulevard near Jimmy Long Field.

As reported last month by the Almanac, that station, most recently called Renzie Mini-Mart, is going to be reopened by the owners of Lampert's Market.