The Enumclaw School District and developer Oakpointe are continuing to discuss how the two can partner to solve one of the district’s most pressing concerns: the lack of schools in Black Diamond as the Ten Trail neighborhood continues to grow.

Since two recent bonds failed, ESD announced it is looking at how to “creatively repurpose assets” with Oakpointe to partially or fully fund a new elementary school.

According to Oakpointe Chief Executive Officer Brian Ross and ESD Director of Business Kyle Fletcher, this includes Oakpointe buying land from ESD.

“There are land assets that they control through our Comprehensive School Mitigation agreement that… given the current set of circumstances, the district probably doesn’t need,” Ross said.

The district, Oakpointe, and the city of Black Diamond made ESD enrollment projections back in 2010, when the agreement between the three parties was signed after years of discussions.

But “Since then, several factors (pandemic, housing market, etc.) have caused the student generation rate… to decrease,” Fletcher said. “All that said… the student growth for ESD that was originally projected for this master planned development (MPD) was much higher than our current trends and projections.”

Ross said that with these new projections, the district may not need some of the land originally set aside for it.

“They don’t need, we… believe, as many school sites that we have planned,” he continued. “This leads us to look at those land assets as a valuable commodity, but unrealized. How do we unlock that value?”

The answer could be to re-negotiate the Comprehensive School Mitigation agreement to allow Oakpointe to purchase the land.

An interesting part of this solution is the disparity between what the district “paid” for these parcels of land, and how much Oakpointe would pay to acquire them.

As part of the Comprehensive School Mitigation, ESD controls various parcels in Ten Trails (and its sister development, Lawson Hills). However, they haven’t purchased them — this is done using money collected from developers every time they build a home in the neighborhood. These are called mitigation fees.

Back in 2021, ESD bought four parcels of land in Ten Trails (known officially as the Ten Trails Elementary Site A) and Lawson Hills (the Lawson Hills Elementary site) for $6.5 million, collected via mitigation fees.

Reserved still for the district are three parcels: the Ten Trails Middle School site (26.7 acres), the Ten Trails Elementary B site (16.48 acres), and the High School Site (41.93 acres plus a 1.5 acre auxiliary site).

These pieces of land are not purchased at market value, but are calculated in a different fashion.

However, Ross said that Oakpointe would buy that land at a fair market value, a potential boon ESD.

“We can use that higher valuation to help pay for [a] elementary school,” Ross said. But, of course, the potential value of that land to Oakpointe must also make sense to the developer to acquire. “We can’t pay more than we would otherwise pay for the site to get a school built.”

The market value of the land is unknown at the time, but Ross said the difference could be millions of dollars.

But questions about this proposed funding strategy still exist, like would this money be enough to build a whole school?

Ross said that mitigation fees could fill any gap between the money ESD gains from selling its land and the actual cost of a school, but he also seemed open to the idea that Oakpointe could underwrite the difference as well.

“We’re trying to keep an open mind on our side, and the district is trying to do the same thing,” he said.

But this is likely only a short-term solution, as the district will need more than just a new elementary school in the future.

“The fact remains that just over 1,200 homes in [Ten Trails and Lawson Hills] have been completed, and another 4,000-plus homes are scheduled to be built in the next 10 to 15 years,” Fletcher said. “As we continue to grow as a school district, in both Enumclaw and Black Diamond, we will need to find a way, working with our school district community, to both maintain and rebuild some of our older facilities in Enumclaw, and also add capacity through new facility construction in the Black Diamond.”