LONDONDERRY — In the days following the town’s very public attempts to address an error in handling town impact fees, school administrators vowed to embrace a similar transparency when it comes to their role in the impact fees process.

During Tuesday night’s School Board meeting, Peter Curro, the district’s business administrator, shared details of the school district’s use of impact fees over the past two decades.

Approved by the state Legislature as a method for municipalities to offset the financial stress of growth in the area of capital improvements, the town began collecting impact fees in the early 1990s.

Earlier this summer, however, acting Town Manager William R. Hart announced that the town’s impact fees program was in need of a major overhaul and that the town would be returning up to $1.3 million in improperly collected fees to property owners and developers.

State law doesn’t allow impact fees to be used for improvements to state highways. In addition, any fees that are collected and remain unspent or unspoken for within six years are required by law to be returned to the person who paid the impact fee.

As it stands now, the town’s Planning Department is working with a consultant to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself.

Curro said there haven’t been any problems, to his knowledge, on the school’s part.

“In our case, the school district provides certain data needed to ascertain any growth constants the school district may have,” Curro said this week.

That data includes enrollment trends, current space needs and what growth is being addressed when it comes to any particular capital improvement project.

“This data along with general demographic data from the Planning Department will derive the calculations through the methodology of the impact fee program,” Curro continued.

It’s the town’s responsibility to collect and maintain impact fees, school officials said.

“Our involvement here is to provide information to the town. We explain what we want to do and the project is evaluated with our input, our data,” Curro explained.

The school district has never had to return impact fees, he said.

Both the middle school and high school projects had been approved to receive impact fee funds to help alleviate the costs of facilities due to community growth.

The district used impact fees totaling $445,155 to offset the construction costs for the middle school addition in 1998.

At that time, Curro said, the district was under enormous enrollment pressure and had reviewed several options to provide additional space for growing student population.

“The expansion of the middle school provided the space for the sixth grade to move from the elementary schools to the middle school, thus addressing the many capacity issues at the elementary level,” said Curro. “The town really had a difficult time then. We were adapting to a great deal of growth.”

The district continues to withdraw impact fees to make payments on completed renovations at Londonderry High School, which were done several years after the middle school’s improvements. The district withdrew $1 million when construction first started and annually withdraws amounts ranging from $100,000 to $350,000 depending on available funds in the school impact fee account.

However, impact fees weren’t used toward more recent renovations at North or South elementary schools.

“The district felt these two projects were renovations to replace deteriorated areas of the schools and did not address the space or growth needs of the district,” said Curro.

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April Guilmet may be reached at AGuilmet@newstote.com.