East Mills School District Continues To Pursue Farm Land For Bus Barn

The East Mills School Board voted last week to continue pursuing the acquisition of a parcel of farmland east of the school campus it hopes to use for a bus barn.

The board’s decision would seem to hold off on its rumored plan to acquire the land through eminent domain while committing the district to further negotiations once an appraisal of the five-acre piece of property is completed.

The resolution the board sought public impute on and ultimately voted to approve at its regular meeting last Wednesday allows Superintendent Mike Brown and Special Project Coordinator Tim Hood to commission a formal appraisal of the plot of land on the Jeff Zanders Family Farm property, located east of East Mills School.

The board has been actively negotiating to purchase the parcel from the Zanders family for nearly a year, according to East Mills School Board President Mark Stearns.

“We’ve been going back and forth trying to sort out details and work it out and we haven’t been able to come to an agreement for one reason or another,” Stearns said.

The appraisal, Stearns hopes, will put both parties on the same page.

“We want a common reference that we can use and go back to negotiations with,” Stearns said. “At this point, we clearly have wildly different references (for value of the property).”

When asked to clarify what the sticking point might be between the two parties and if the issue is strictly a financial difference, Stearns declined to answer, saying “I’d rather not go into those details.”

“In the interest of good faith negotiations, I don’t want to presume what they are thinking or what their positions are,” Stearns said. “I will say negotiations are on-going and we do hope to come to an agreement.”

Once the appraisal valuation is completed and provided to the property owners, Stearns said the district is required to wait 10 days before making another offer.

The Zanders’ farm parcel is directly to the east of the football field. The “triangle” of land, as Stearns describes it, currently houses a machine shed and a handful of grain bins and has access to the gravel road from the 14th Street cutoff road along the southern edge of the school campus.

The district hopes to build a 10,000 square-foot bus barn with washing bays for the district’s 12-bus fleet and a concrete lot with auxiliary parking.

“We looked at lots of alternatives and really we’re trying to get our most bang for our buck and stretch our tax dollars are far as we can so we can get as much as we can for our kids and our students,” Stearns said.

Nearly 100 visitors packed the school’s common area for last Wednesday’s regular school board meeting – many with questions about the district’s use of eminent domain why that particular parcel of land and is being eyed by the district.

Iowa law allows school districts to utilize eminent domain to acquire private property for public use in cases where the property is a necessity and only with fair compensation to the property owners. The code also requires the district to make good faith efforts to negotiate with landowners before pursuing an eminent domain action.

In any potential eminent domain case, the first step in such a process is an unbiased, third-party appraisal.

While Stearns knows that the board’s decision looks like that “first step,” he cautioned against looking at the move as the district favoring the eminent domain option.

“It is the next step in that process, but it is the very, very first step,” he said. “There would be other public hearings required and other resolutions that would have to be passed before this is executed. This (resolution) is simply to get a formal appraisal so that we can see what the fair market value is and go from there.”

Stearns isn’t a fan of eminent domain and the board, he said, shares that sentiment.

“No one on our board wants to go to eminent domain,” said Stearns, whose family still owns farmland in Lucas County in central Iowa.

“Next year our family farm will be 150 years in our family. So, I get it, I understand the family farm dynamic. Once land is broken apart, it can’t go back together. But the school is where it is and its landlocked, so to speak.”

Stearns went on to say the board is focused on “doing the right thing for our district and our students.”

“We want to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollars we’re trusted with and working with our neighbors and community members to come to an amicable solution.”

The district currently does not have a bus barn. The school has utilized a two-bay maintenance building on the Southwest Iowa Technical Career Hub (SWITCH) campus nine miles away on Highway 34 but it isn’t large enough for the district’s current needs.

“You can’t fit a whole bus in there,” Stearns said. “You can nose the bus in there for changing oil and stuff, but it can’t go all the way in. Buses are an expensive investment for schools, and we’re just trying to protect them and make them last as long as possible.”

In addition to the bus barn, the potential site would also allow for extra event parking and groundskeeping storage, which Stearns said the district desperately needs as a campus.

The new parcel would also afford more space for the discus and shot put for track, which currently utilizes the baseball outfield.

“There’s a lot of things that make that spot work well and fill some needs,” he said.

The cost of construction on that site is also more favorable than the other sites the district considered to the north of the campus and a parcel to the west of the school along 315th/Main Street. Both of those parcels, Stearns said, had drawbacks from the expensive grading that would be required to potentially having to back busses out on the highway.
If the ground is secured and a site plan completed, construction work would likely not begin before Fall 2026.

The price tag for the bus barn remains up in the air but Stearns said the project was always a part of the district’s initial plan for the newly consolidated and re-vamped East Mills K-12 Community School and that $22 million bond. But the pandemic, inflation and the rising costs of construction forced the district to back burner the bus barn in lieu of the school addition and the new gymnasium.

“I’m hopeful,” he said. “We’ll get the appraisal back and we can get this done.”