The Sausalito Marin City School District will spend nearly $150,000 on a facilities consultant to help figure out how to bring the district’s two campuses together.

Trustees on Monday voted to retain Oakland-based Kodama-Diseno Inc. and Berkeley-based WLC Architects Inc. to develop a facilities master plan that would suggest the best way to bring the district’s traditional school, Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy in Marin City and Willow Creek Academy charter school in Sausalito, which is under district auspices, together under one school serving all 500 district kids over the two campuses.

The contract calls for a $148,780 payment to the firms, who were chosen from three proposals received by a Nov. 19 deadline, according to staff report at Monday’s board meeting.

“They’re going to help with the unification efforts,” district Superintendent Itoco Garcia said at Tuesday’s town hall at Bayside MLK.

But Kurt Weinsheimer, board president for Willow Creek, said the contract award was premature.

“It’s putting the cart before the horse,” Weinsheimer said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “How can we decide on facilities when we don’t yet have a unification plan?”

He said that was indicative of the overall unification efforts, which he described as  “disorganized” and “not very collaborative.”

Garcia disputed those allegations. He pointed to more than a half-dozen parents and other volunteers from both schools who presented reports on suggested ideas and visions at Tuesday’s town hall.

“Really, a lot (of the unification) doesn’t depend on facilities,”  Garcia said. “Do facilities drive the programs, or do programs run the facilities? We’re building an amazing program here — don’t we want to have the state-of-the-art facilities in every area of school life that residents in a city like Sausalito and in Marin City expect?”

He resisted Weinsheimer’s use of the word “disorganized,” saying the unification process was moving “organically” and so “can sometimes seem messy” to some observers. Despite that perception, he said the district was solidly on track to deliver a draft unification plan to the boards of both schools by January.

“We’re open to all possibilities,” he said of the unification plan. “I’m excited that we heard support tonight (at the town hall) for a bold and daring world-class facility that will host amazing programs.”

Garcia said the district was also on track to comply with a settlement agreement reached in August with the state Attorney General’s Office to desegregate Bayside MLK within five years. The desegregation order and the unification efforts are both moving forward on separate, but parallel tracks, Garcia said.

Weinsheimer, whose board is embroiled in a legal fight with the district over how to sustain Willow Creek financially while the unification process is under way, said he thought the immensity of the project deserved more time and a stronger organization and schedule. He also disputed Garcia’s insistence that “everything was going great” in the process.

“You (Garcia) can say it’s going well, but if half of the people involved say, ‘No, it’s not going well,’ then it’s not going well,” Weisheimer said. Last month, Willow Creek board member Jim Henry, one of five members of the unification task force, quit the group in protest of what he said was the financial uncertainty afforded to Willow Creek, which has seen its enrollment drop by 30 families in the current school year.

Scores of Willow Creek parents have expressed anguish about the uncertainty in written letters to the district board and at public comment during board meetings.

“What makes my child worth less than another child in the school district?” Willow Creek parents Tobias and Annika Tornqvist wrote in a Dec. 8 letter to the district board president Ida Green. “Shouldn’t every student — regardless of what public school they attend — be treated equally and be given the same access to public education resources?”

But Marilyn Mackel of Marin City said in a Dec. 10 letter that the Willow Creek parents seem unaware of why the state Attorney General stepped into the fray in the first place.

“(It’s because) members of the SCMSD school board in prior years acted in breach of its fiduciary duty to the district school (Bayside MLK),” Mackel wrote.

Weinsheimer said if the district would agree to cover about $800,000 in costs for Willow Creek special education students, it would go a long way to offset a $1 million cutback in funds for 2019-20 that the district had previously granted to the charter school for facilities and special education.

About $3.5 million of the district’s approximately $10 million in annual property tax revenue is distributed to serve roughly 400 Willow Creek students, while about $6.5 million is set aside for the approximately 100 students at Bayside MLK.

“In what world is that considered reasonable?” Weinsheimer said. The discrepancy has been a crux of the long-standing dispute — along with other factors, such as race, socioeconomic status and academic achievement.

Garcia said he expects this week to receive a third, neutral legal opinion regarding switching to an all-charter versus an all-traditional public school. Earlier opinions from counsels for both schools were at odds with each other, he said.

“This will give us an impartial view of a potential school configuration,” Garcia said. “It will show us the costs and benefits of either option.”