At a special election in December, Millis voters approved a ballot question to authorize a tax increase for the town’s share of a $125 million renovation/addition project at the Millis Middle/High School with a vote of 1,599 (74.51%) in favor and 547 (25.49%) opposed. 

The Millis Town Clerk’s Office reported a 29% voter turnout with 2,146 of the town’s 7,352 registered voters casting a ballot. 

This was the second step in a two-step process. At Fall Town Meeting in November, voters had approved the project with a near-unanimous vote.  

The Massachusetts School Building Authority will the majority of the costs (est. $68 million), and Millis will pay the remaining (est. $56 million) to be financed over a 28-year period. A Millis resident with an average property assessment of $605,209 will see an increase of approximately $914 per year starting in spring 2029. 

After the measure passed, Chair of the Millis School Building Committee Richard Nichols said, “I want to thank the citizens for voting ‘yes’ to fund the necessary improvements/ addition to the Millis Middle/High School. This will be an opportunity to use state funds (almost 60%) to reduce the costs to the taxpayers of Millis. I understand this is an added burden to all the taxpayers, but we understood that we would have had to spend money to do necessary repairs even if the vote did not pass.”

He added, “In 10 years, I hope we will look back and realize that we did the right thing at the right time to bring our school into the 21st century.” 

According to Diane Jurmain, Vice Chair of the School Building Committee, the next step will be to identify and interview a construction manager. 

“We have chosen to utilize the building process known as Construction Management at Risk, which means that we start with a team of an Owner’s Project Manager (Vertex Engineering), a Designer (Tappe Architects) and a Construction Manager (to be determined). They work as a team on the Schematic Design phase of the project. Our design up to this point has been conceptual and it will be finalized by the team.

 “It has been our experience on the new Clyde Brown School, that this method identifies design issues and resolves them early on in the project. It’s a very structured approach and that approach allowed the School Building Committee to complete the Clyde Brown School project under budget by $4 million. It doesn’t happen every time but it is a very reasonable approach,” said Jurmain.  

For more information, visit www.millisschoolproject.com