BREMERTON — The Bremerton School Board voted to give the district the ability to use a $700,000 interfund loan for the West Hills STEM Academy expansion project at its March 21 meeting.

The loan would account for a scenario in which the contractors moved faster than the district could pay them.

“We don’t want the lack of cash flow to put a hamper on the project,” said Director of Finance Garth Steedman.

If that were to happen, the district would have to dip into its general fund money to pay the contractors.

General fund money can’t be replaced if used for capital projects.

The project is estimated to $1.1 million.

“Now, we might have enough (capital project money) to get the work done during the summer,” Steedman said. “The problem is we can’t slow down the contractor once he or she gets cookin’ on it.”

The district will collect about $1 million in capital levy dollars between March and May when property taxes are collected. Next fall it will collect another $900,000.

“We’re paying for (the project) as we go,” Steedman said. “We’ll have finished paying for it once we have collected the fall levee collection.”

The loan would be required to be repaid within a year plus about one percent interest.

“We will only take what we need if we need it and if we don’t need it we won’t take it,” Steedman said. “It’s just to make sure we don’t run out of capital project money in the middle of the summer.”

He added that because levy collections occur over a period of time, cash flow considerations are paramount when designing capital projects funded with capital levies.

The need for an interfund loan comes from a relatively low balance of unencumbered money in the capital project fund.

Currently, the district has about $180,000 of unencumbered money remaining in its capital projects funds. Encumbered and unencumbered funds total about $558,000.

Steedman said the unencumbered figure is somewhat low due to the number of projects authorized by the district.

Last summer, the district made about $100,000 in repairs to the Bremerton High School roof. The district was making payments in September for work done in August — a different fiscal year — so some costs were taken out of the current budget.