LEWISTON — The Regional Technical Center has received a $980,000 state grant to purchase equipment, including an electric vehicle, medical mannequins and a sawdust collection bin system for three of the school’s programs.

Since the grant is made available through a bond bank, it may require acceptance by voters at a referendum, Superintendent Jake Langlais said during Monday’s School Committee meeting.

“Because of the bond process, we can’t just accept the grant and go do it. We have to satisfy the steps in Maine statute and also local charter,” he said.

“The way the award was restructured from the state, they’re requiring all of the awardees to go through the bond bank,” Rob Callahan, director at Lewiston Regional Technical Center said.

“I do not know the basis for taking the bond approach at the state level,” Langlais said in an email.

The possibility of a referendum is because of the unique nature of the grant.

“Because it’s a bond and it’s borrowed money, anytime the city borrows money, that’s a liability because it’s going to be in Lewiston Public Schools’ name, even though the bond is 100% paid back by the state,” Langlais said. “It’s like when we build a new school. That money is bonded, it’s borrowed, but it’s reimbursed back to the city of Lewiston, which then pays the bond back.”

Officials are in talks with lawyers and the City Council to determine if the council can approve the bond. If it cannot, the issue will go to voters in December or January.

“I do not foresee any interest or bond premium in the detail,” he said. “We will be meeting with the bond folks soon and we will have more clarity once the next rounds of meetings have occurred.”

The grant and the process to receive the funds do not pose any tax burden for the residents, Langlais said in response to a question from Ward 1 representative Phoenix McLaughlin.

If the City Council is not able to approve it, then a December or January referendum is expected.

The money will be used to buy equipment, including an electric vehicle and engineering kits for different grade levels, Callahan said.

“(The electric vehicle) is designed to be built and rebuilt by students, and that includes all the electrical pieces — braking systems, the battery trays and all that sort of thing,” he said. “Our hope is to not only have it here at the high school, but to take it on the road to the middle school and so forth so that students of all ages could see how an electrical vehicle operates.”

Other equipment to be added are two new medical mannequins for the technical center’s medical science and certified nursing assistant programs, as well as an upgraded sawdust collection bin system.

“We have an aging sawdust collection bin system here,” Callahan said. “It sometimes looks like a snow globe in our shops when we have a lot of machines fired up, and that would be something that we’d be replacing.”

The grant would make a partnership between the center and and University of Maine’s Engineering School possible. “We’ve developed a series of micro-credentials in a number of engineering aspects, and so the last piece of this would be to buy a number of (pieces of training equipment) that our students could work with, become introduced to the technology and processes, which hopefully they would continue through high school and then into the University of Maine’s engineering program,” Callahan said.