September 5, 1999 Boston Globe

SPOTLIGHT FOLLOW-UP

Home sweet (deal) home

Vocational students learn by building houses for free, but questions surround the process by which some homeowners are selected

By Walter V. Robinson, Globe Staff, 09/05/99

It is a prospective homeowner's dream: Win a lottery and have student carpenters, electricians, and plumbers from the regional vocational high school, supervised by master craftsmen, build a home. There is no charge for labor.

Yet, in the 17 communities served by vocational high schools in Billerica and Wakefield, there's barely a trickle of applicants for a public subsidy that can amount to $50,000 or more in labor costs.

Many years, there have been just one or two applicants for the ''lotteries'' the schools run. In some cases, the winners appear to have more than luck going for them:

In the 1994-95 school year, the Shawsheen Valley Regional Vocational Technical High School in Billerica, setting aside rules that disqualify family members of school employees and board members, built a home - 50 percent larger than permitted - for David Buffum. He is the son of Kenneth Buffum, an elected member of the school's board.

The following school year, the school built a home for Ellen C. Ryan, the daughter of one of Billerica's most successful businessmen. In her application, Ryan praised the school for the house they built in 1986-87 for her brother, Timothy P. Roy.

In 1996-97, the year after Ryan's home was built, the Billerica school built a second house for Timothy Roy.

Students from the Northeast Regional Vocational Technical High School in Wakefield built a 4,100-square-foot home in Stoneham - twice as big as school rules allow - for Stephen H. Columbus, a lawyer who owns several other properties. His father, Stoneham building inspector Robert Columbus, engineered a last-minute approval required for his son's application, an apparent violation of the state conflict-of-interest law.

The Columbus project has turned into a fiasco for both the Wakefield school and the homeowner: After nearly two years of construction, Columbus filed a legal claim against the school for shoddy construction, including allegations that the student builders deliberately jammed ''globs of chewing gum'' in the Jacuzzi jets and scrawled the message ''I [expletive] up this house'' on a wall.

In all four cases, the winners were the only qualified applicants: Both programs place daunting hurdles in the way of those without inside knowledge.

In the 17 communities, prospective homebuyers shut out of the regular housing market by escalating prices have virtually no chance to compete. Even those who think they are eligible sometimes get left by the wayside. A Saugus woman who was Columbus's only competitor in 1996 was ruled ineligible when she failed to provide additional documentation she was asked for, according to a notation in the Wakefield school's records. But the woman, Patricia Agnello, said she never received any such request.

''I filled out an application, mailed it, and never heard from them,'' Agnello said recently. She ended up paying a contractor to build a home for her family.

The lottery at the Billerica school, during this decade, has attracted just one eligible applicant six times, no applicant at all twice, and just two applicants last year.

At both schools, officials insisted there has been no favoritism, even though the Shawsheen school violated its own policy banning family staff or board members from participating when it built a 3,100-square-foot house for Buffum.

But a Globe Spotlight Team examination of records at the two schools suggests favoritism is built into the rules, making the application process an insiders' game. The rules require applicants to own a lot that has been certified to be buildable, have building plans, and arrange financing for the materials. Yet, both schools advertise their programs to the public little more than a month before the application deadline.

''I thought, what a wonderful program,'' recalled Lorraine Parisella of Bedford, who sought an application after seeing the Shawsheen ad in 1994. ''But like 95 percent of the people, I couldn't take advantage of it. I abandoned the idea, just as many people would, because the timing was impossible.'' Now, sheepish officials at both schools say they are mulling ways to change the rules, to broaden and equalize participation in the programs, and in Wakefield to find a way to avoid a repeat of the Columbus home snafu.

''I would much prefer building affordable housing in the future, rather than homes for people of privilege,'' said Charles Lyons, the superintendent-director of the Shawsheen school, which serves the towns of Bedford, Burlington, Wilmington, Billerica, and Tewksbury.

Lyons, who has run the school since 1987, said he would be eager to work with a nonprofit housing collaborative. That, he said, ''would pass every smell test there is.''

Moreover, towns that fund the vocational schools share the concerns. In Stoneham, town officials were incredulous when they learned in 1996 that Columbus, who owns four properties and has bought and sold several others, was the sole qualified applicant in a district that includes 12 communities north of Boston. At the time, their suspicions prompted them to hold up the building permit for three months.

''As a matter of perception, this stinks,'' said Albert B. Conti, Stoneham's chairman of selectmen, who said he will ask officials from the Wakefield vocational school to appear before his committee. ''If we're going to subsidize this school, then they need to open up this selection process.''

The Globe's attention was drawn to the vocational school lotteries after a recent Spotlight Team report that the unmarried son of a selectman in Easton had been able to buy a home earmarked for moderate-income families at a $100,000 discount after the town's lottery selection process was altered to his benefit. That report was part of a continuing Globe series on corruption, conflicts of interest, or favoritism in local government that has so far focused attention on 14 Massachusetts communities.

The two schools are among 26 regional vocational schools in Massachusetts, each run by a separate school board whose members are often virtually unknown in the communities they serve. The state Department of Education says it has no idea how many of the schools have home-building programs or what rules they follow. Nor, said a department spokesman, is there any oversight to prevent abuses.

In the absence of outside oversight, the process has worked quite nicely for some. Labor costs in home building, according to some industry specialists, currently range from $35 to $50 per square foot, depending on the quality of the craftsmanship.

The house built for Ellen Ryan, whose brother had once benefited from the program, is a case in point. Ryan applied to have her house built on March 8, 1995, barely a month after the school advertised its program for the upcoming school year.

School and town of Billerica records show that Ryan, like other winners, had a headstart: She bought the buildable lot in October 1994, sought the building permit the same month, and filed a proposed building plan with the town on Jan. 9, 1995. Yet Ryan said she first approached the school in March 1995, after she learned it had no applicants. She refused to say who referred her, but said school officials said they would build her house if she would complete the paperwork.

Ryan denied she had a patron or any inside knowledge, or any assurances when she bought the lot that she would be the winner.

But in explaining the process, she said at one point that the town approvals she sought in late 1994 came quickly ''because I told them the Voke Tech was going to build my house.'' That was months before Ryan said she learned about the program's availability.

Just before Ryan moved into her spacious ranch house in mid-1996, the school found itself with no applicant for the next school year.

''I guess I heard just before they finished my sister's house that they had no applicants, so I went down to the school and they said they'd build a house for me,'' said Ryan's brother, Timothy Roy, who said he too happened to have a buildable lot ready to go. With that promise in hand, Roy, according to real estate records, sold his house on Newbury Street in Billerica in August 1996 for $254,000 - the house the school built for him in 1986-87. His latest school-built home, on B Street in Billerica, was finished in mid-1997.

Roy said he had no qualms about asking the school to build him two homes. ''These kids build a great house. Without a house to build, they'd sit there and do nothing,'' Roy said.

Roy is so bullish on the program that he said he might consider asking the school to build him a third house. ''Maybe 10 years down the road, if they needed a house project, and I needed a house, of course I'd ask again,'' he said.

Lyons said he had no qualms about picking Roy a second time. ''The fact that he won before didn't even enter our consideration,'' he said. But when David Buffum, the son of Shawseen board member Kenneth Buffum, inquired about applying in 1993, Lyons turned him down, citing the school's policy barring family members from participating. He also sought an opinion from the school's attorney, who wrote that allowing Buffum to enter the lottery ''would raise significant legal concerns under the Massachusetts State Conflict of Interest Law.''

Citing that law, David M. Mandel of the Boston firm of Ropes & Gray wrote Lyons on June 2, 1993 that ''public officials are required to avoid actions which create the appearance of impropriety ... Even if the lottery were run fairly and honestly, and the School Committee's relative simply were lucky enough to be selected, there would be substantial concerns that an impression of favoritism had been created.''

Armed with Mandel's advice, Lyons told Buffum in June 1993 that he was not eligible. The school found another family for the program and built a house for them.

In early 1994, David Buffum formally applied. In a recent interview, Mandel said that in the absence of other applicants - even after the school advertised twice - he reasoned there could be no appearance of favoritism since there were no other applicants. No vote of the committee was involved.

David Buffum, in an interview last week, said he went forward that year because, ''As a taxpayer, I ought to have available to me the same benefit as any other taxpayer.''

But once Buffum was selected, the school immediately set aside its requirement that his home be restricted to 2,000 square feet. Buffum presented the school with plans for a 3,100-square-foot home with four bedrooms, substantially larger than customary.

The school accepted that, Lyons said, because Buffum ''was doing us a favor.'' Without his application, Lyons said, the students would have had no home to build.

''I gave them an ultimatum: If you don't build this house, I'll walk away,'' Buffum recalled. Gary Baker, a school official who helped oversee the construction, said: ''It's human nature: When you're getting something for nothing, you get as much as you can.''

At the Wakefield school, superintendent-director Thomas F. Markham, who retired a month ago, acknowledged that eligibility requirements for the school's house-building program, like those at Shawsheen, effectively exclude most people. From 1991 to 1998, the school averaged just three applicants a year. Markham said there have been years with just one applicant.

The first week of April in 1996, the school advertised its program in local newspapers in 12 communities. Potential applicants then discovered that they had only until May 1 to buy a vacant lot, get approval to build on it, and obtain financing for the materials to build the home.

According to the school's records, 20 people requested applications. Only Columbus and Agnello applied and Agnello was disqualified. Columbus won by default.

At the outset, Stoneham town officials, suspicious of Columbus's good fortune and his father's role in making it possible, delayed issuing a building permit.

Their concerns were not without justification. In 1993, the elder Columbus was fined $750 by the state Ethics Commission for issuing building permits for himself and his two sons for buildings the three men owned, a violation of state law forbidding public officials from participating in a matter in which they or family members have a financial interest. Three years later, the elder Columbus appeared to violate the same law yet again.

With the house application deadline looming, Stephen Columbus wrote the Stoneham Building Department on April 22, 1996, asking for needed certification that his property on High Rock Road was buildable. The next day, he supplied the Wakefield school with an April 22 response from his father's office, certifying the lot to be buildable. It was signed by Stephen Paris, the building commissioner in neighboring Woburn.

Rosemary Geary, the clerk in the Stoneham Building Department, confirmed a report from town officials that Robert Columbus asked her to type the letter. In a brief interview last week, Robert Columbus admitted hand-carrying the document to Paris for his signature. Paris acknowledged signing the letter as a favor for Columbus, but said he could not recall whether he determined that the certification was allowable.

For his part, Stephen Columbus denied asking his father for the letter and professed ignorance about its origin. ''What Robert Columbus does is out of my control. I have no idea what my father was thinking,'' Columbus said in an interview. Columbus moved into the home only last month, and now asserts he would have gotten a better-quality house for less had he paid a builder to do it. The school says it allowed the 2,300-square-foot house to grow in size because Columbus kept asking for changes. A third floor was added, a basement finished. Columbus insisted it was the school that suggested the changes.

Whatever happened, Markham said, ''the house became massive ... I guess you could say things got out of hand.'' So much so that the school's attorney, Howard Greenspan, eager to avoid a costly and embarrassing lawsuit threatened by Columbus, is preparing a settlement.

''Mr. Columbus's claims to defects in the construction are well-founded,'' Greenspan said. ''Some of the problems cannot be fixed unless you rip the house down.''

Meanwhile, questions about the selection process at both schools have prompted much soul-searching. Even Roy, with two houses to his credit, admits to having thought about it. ''It's supposed to be a lottery,'' said Roy. ''But when there's just one name in the barrel, I guess it ain't much of a lottery.'' Alice Dembner and Matt Carroll of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.

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