In 2022, Mill Valley School District voters passed a bond measure to replace its aging Mill Valley Middle School campus. That’s a significant task.

Three years after voters’ endorsement of the measure, as construction costs increase, district trustees are still looking at possible sites. Among them is revisiting building the school on the Edna Maguire Elementary School campus.

There is community opposition to building the new campus on the Sycamore Avenue site where the school has stood since 1969.

The school was built on landfill that covered an old dump and marsh.

Critics have argued that there has to be better sites than rebuilding the campus on an old disposal site that’s near the regional sewage treatment plant and possibly subject to sea-level rise.

Analysis of possible alternatives is part of the required environmental review mandated by state law.

School board President Sharon Nakatani says the Sycamore Avenue site is still the district’s preferred location, but the district has also commissioned a special environmental review of the property — a study conducted with oversight by the state and the county.

The school board already explored one controversial alternative, building the campus on the Friends Field sports complex, property it owns, but one that the district had already committed to community recreation. Sizable political backlash, including from Mill Valley City Hall, led the board to scrap that option.

Measure G, the 2022 bond measure approved by voters, designated $130 million to replace or upgrade the middle school.

Certainly, if its plan included building the campus on the Friends Field complex, the politics and results may have been different than the 66% support Measure G got.

The district will need to make sure it stretches every penny of that sum to keep its promise to voters. The district is already working to dig itself out of a budgetary hole. Whether returning to voters for another bond can withstand a potential battle over the site and possibly local voters’ understandable weariness over school tax measures is a question trustees have to broach.

The board’s decision, albeit belated, to do additional analysis of environmental and health questions raised about the Sycamore Avenue site is responsive to community concerns raised by critics of the Sycamore location.

Even its short-lived shift of plans to the Friends Field site also delayed progress.

But at some point, hopefully soon, the school board needs to start moving forward at a diligent pace to come up with a construction plan, one that makes sense and has community support.

That the district has taken so long to make significant headway toward that goal is frustrating. Controversy often delays decisions and with this project, district decision makers have faced a minefield of criticism and questions.

Still, after selling voters on plans to rebuild or overhaul the middle school campus, the district has been painfully slow in meeting its end of that public bargain.

There has been an unexpected prolonged debate over the site and a draft environmental report that is still being written.

Issues that should have been resolved are still up in the air.

Understandably, the district’s leadership wants to make the right decisions. Given the opposition to the Sycamore Avenue site, it needs to make sure it fully complies with state environmental requirements.

At this point, the district needs a business-like schedule for making decisions with a goal of finally deciding where the new school is going to be built and working on design and construction plans.