By Richard Leitner, News Staff

The Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board will release previously confidential reports this Friday detailing how trustees chose the Crestwood school site near Lime Ridge Mall for new administrative headquarters.

Chair Tim Simmons said the information can now be disclosed because there’s no longer any worry trustees will have rethink their selection and look at other properties, which could drive their price up.

Before identifying Crestwood, trustees had previously suggested Jerome Park on the west Mountain as a potential site for the $31.6-million headquarters, slated to open in March 2014.

“We don’t want to pay any more than we have to,” Simmons said. “The reason property disposition is always behind closed doors is to protect the taxpayers.”

Trustees last week rejected calls to reconsider the Crestwood plan, which has been public since last March, in favour of potentially building at city hall, located across the street from the existing Education Centre, opened in 1967.

The board is in the process of finalizing the sale of the Education Centre to McMaster University, which plans to demolish the landmark building and construct an $85-million health campus that will also house the city’s health department.

Simmons said he’s hopeful those talks will be concluded by the end of this month. A key sticking point has been where and how much it will cost to relocate board staff until the new headquarters are built.

“We’re anxious to get moving and I think all parties are,” he said.

While trustees voted to make the confidential reports public following a closed-door session on Monday, Simmons attributed the delay in their formal release to the need for staff to provide some explanatory notes.

The reports are expected to be posted on the board’s website – www.hwdsb.on.ca – some time on Friday.

“Because the reports are so technical in nature, the board wanted staff to record clarifications on technical aspects of the report,” Simmons said. “Otherwise you’re not going to get context on a lot of the stuff in the report.”