GORHAM – With Gorham voters facing a June referendum on a public safety complex, school officials have delayed its plans to ask local taxpayers this year to pay for a high school renovation and expansion.

Town leaders are continuing to work toward the project, which hinges on voter approval in a referendum that could be more than a year away. Officials have already authorized spending at least $230,000, which included buying a house, for the proposed high school project.

School officials had previously looked at November for a referendum to ask Gorham voters to approve a multi-million-dollar high school project. But now, Gorham Superintendent Ted Sharp said Tuesday, November 2014 is a tentative date for a high school referendum.

Gorham voters will decide on Tuesday, June 11, whether to construct a public safety complex costing $6.3 million at the site of the former Little Falls School on Acorn Street.

“We’re trying to be sensitive to what the town needs to address,” Sharp said last week in the School Committee meeting.

The high school project could likely run in the $11 million range or more, with Gorham taxpayers shouldering the total cost. The state would not participate in funding it.

The overcrowded high school building, which opened in 1959, was renovated 18 years ago to accommodate about 675 students with enrollment swelling to nearly 900 six years ago. But numbers had steadily declined, to 851 students on Sept. 12, 2012.

The Gorham High School Exploratory Committee formed in October 2009 to study problem areas at the high school, which included lack of classrooms, cramped cafeteria, parking space shortage, security issues and lack of athletic fields.

A letter last year to Sharp from Lyndon Keck of PDT Architects, who was involved in the exploratory committee, indicated a new turf field to be constructed in a Phase III of the project.

Following the exploratory committee groundwork, a building committee is now studying the high school renovation and expansion project. Phil Gagnon, Town Council chairman, said this week that a referendum date would rest in the hands of the town council.

“The council would have to take action on it sometime next year, when the committee gives its recommendation,” Gagnon said.

But in an uncertain economic climate and a possible council change, there’s no guarantee now for the project going to referendum. The council next year could have a new complexion and sentiment about the high school project, as terms of councilors Matthew Robinson, John Pressey and Gagnon expire this fall.

Nonetheless, the Town Council on March 5 authorized a $75,000, interest-free loan from the town’s capital project reserve account to the school committee for the high school project.

“I believe the building committee receives the money now to work toward the renovation plan for the 2014 referendum,” Gagnon said.

With a school project in mind last year, the town, with council approval in 2011, invested $155,000 in buying a ranch house on about a 1/3-acre lot adjacent to the high school on Morrill Avenue. The school department this week had yet to identify a use for the property, according to Sharp.

Costs for a high school project do not include any expenses that might have been associated with the exploratory committee. Its study included help from PDT Architects and DeLuca-Hoffman Consulting Engineers.