Five years ago, the city Board of Education voted unanimously to sever all ties with a local contractor who overcharged the district, didn’t complete planned work at schools and paid $10,800 in loans to the school architect who was doling out contracts.

Now, the school board has rehired that Utica-based contractor, George A. Nole & Son Inc., for $8.4 million in work on the school capital project approved by voters in 2008.

In the wake of that decision, board members are debating what severing all ties actually meant.

For board President Barbara Klein, who voted against the measure last month, it meant not working with Nole again.

For board member Donald Dawes, who made the initial motion in 2005 to cut ties, but voted to rehire the company in 2010, it was only a temporary measure.

Whatever the interpretation, the Nole company will once again be working on Utica school buildings later this month.

Since its problems in Utica, the Nole company has worked on several large-scale projects in the area, including ones at Griffiss Business and Technology Park and Rome and Camden schools.

But one good-government expert questioned the Utica school board’s decision.

“It certainly seems surprising that you would go back to a firm that you had so much trouble with the last time,” said Lise Bang-Jensen, senior policy analyst for Empire Center for Public Policy. “If you bought a used car from someone and it turned out to be a lemon, why would you want to buy another one?”

An O-D review of the Nole company’s background shows a firm whose projects and its leader have run into significant troubles in the past, many of them tied to the company’s involvement in an $8.85 million Utica schools capital project approved by voters in the late 1990s…

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