I support the proposed Adams County Technical Institute (ACTI) Land purchase. This effort was not done in a vacuum, ACTI and the ACTI Authority have been working together since 2024 to identify a suitable plot of land. At the ACTI meetings I have attended in the last 18 months they would report the number of sites under consideration and that they would discuss specifics during the executive meetings. A major reason to support this purchase is that our community is in a unique position to leverage $700,000 of other people’s money to the benefit of ACTI. There is the $500,000 grant from Adams Response and Recovery Fund (ARRF) that reduces the overall purchase cost to $1.2 million. The ARRF grant was funded by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) of March 2021, and by law all the funds must be expended by December 31, 2026. The sellers have also agreed to donate $200,000 toward the ACTI Undesignated Endowment Managed by the Adams County Community Foundation upon the sale of the land. Funding from the endowment will benefit future ACTI requirements.
The land will also be an asset that can be leased to growers for potential revenue, parcels of the property can be used by either the construction or agriculture trades students for practical experience and should ACTI ultimately decided not to build on the property it can sold and the funds can be used toward the cost of remodeling existing facilities.
In the meantime, the participating school districts can direct and fund ACTI to do feasibility studies to investigate the following options:
1. The total cost estimate to build a new facility for $35 million dollars or less (the maximum the 2025 school boards indicated they could support), outfit the facility, and provide estimates for the potential operational cost for the next twenty years.
2. The total cost estimates to remodel the current ACTI building and the Gettysburg Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC) Building to support the “clean” and “dirty” tech classes, the cost and/or feasibility of addressing the storm water management, and the potential operational cost for the next twenty to twenty years to include the additional staff, maintenance, insurance, and transportation costs required for a second site.
At that point, the participating school districts would have a better understanding of the total building and operating costs associated with expanding the ACTI programs to meet our future county needs.
By Julieta Booz, Gettysburg