High School Renovation Project 4/10/08

General Comments

The MHS Project Management Advisory Committee met on Thursday 4/10/08 to review the status of the High School Renovation Project.

There continues to be good progress made on the project, and it is basically on schedule, will completion expected by the end of the summer.

Work on the track portion should resume in the next few weeks, when the loam piles have warmed completely, and have dried out a bit. They will then spread the loam, and install the sprinkler system. The sod will be put down after that, and allowed to sit for a while before it is used. Conduit to feed electrical and data feeds to the press box will be fed under the parking lot during the April vacation.

The actual track surface will not be installed until sometime in the summer. The top layer of track surface will bond better to the lower surface when the ground is good an warm. The warmer the better, so they will not do it until June or July. It will all be complete in time for start up of school in the fall.

The interior work is progressing, The music room is almost complete, and the students will move into it in a week or so.

Some of the interior rooms are nearing completion, and classes are moving into them, freeing up more rooms to be worked on.

Minor Problems

The committee reviewed and approved seven different change orders totaling $13,343. These are the typical types of change orders that arise during a renovation project. They included items such as the need for additional sprinkler heads in some new closets, adding sprinkler heads above the ceilings since the ceilings had to be lowered to accommodate piping changes, increasing the snow loading specification for the pressbox, etc.

Major Problems

Three issues have come up that are more serious due to the cost factors involved.

* We are adding new fire detection points to the fire alarm system. These points are being added to provide detection in various sections of the renovation project, including in the mechanicals in the music room and in various areas of room 4. It was not anticipated, but it was discovered that the fire annunciator panel at the front of the building has been maxed-out, and will need to be expanded to add new detection points to the system. It is important that the points be properly identified on the panel, to allow the fire department to quickly develop a plan of action when they respond to a call at the building.

The various people involved are looking at our alternatives at this point in time. One course of action would be to do the minimum amount necessary to get the planned changes identified on the panel. This would leave the panel in a maxed-out state, and require major changes if additional points were needed in the future.

Another alternative would be to expand the panel significantly to allow for future point expansion. This would require that the existing system be taken out and replaced by a completely new system. This will cost a lot more, but has the advantage of allowing us to change the technology that is used to allow for more open source technology, and multiple source sourcing.

The cost penalty for this issue is not known for sure, but it is being investigated. A rough guesstimate is that it is somewhere between $17K and $40K depending on which approach is chosen.

* The budget included $30K for the foundation work for the bleachers. This figure was based on typical foundations for similar bleachers.

It turned out that there are special problems with our particular installation, and a more costly foundation is needed. The basic problem is that there is very little room between the rear of the bleachers and the fence, and the elevation change is steep in that area. Because of this, the design engineer has specified that we install a retaining wall at the rear of the foundation concrete pad to insure that there is the proper support.

The first estimate for the more elaborate foundation was $75K, or $45K over the budgeted amount. We reviewed this issue in detail at the meeting. The final decision was that we asked the people involved to go back and see if they can come up with a design that uses a full size retaining wall at the rear of the press box, but uses a smaller or no retaining wall at all in the other areas of the bleachers where the distance from the structure to the fencing will be greater.

* We received a bill from the water utilities group for a new service entrance fee. This fee is based on anticipated annual usage, and was $22,691 for our filed irrigation system.

We spent a lot of time discussing this fee, and trying to find alternatives. We are going to look into the feasibility of installing a well to replace or supplement the town water service, with the expectation that this would reduce the entrance fee and/or reduce our annual water charges.

Mike Trojano had received a rough guesstimate of a typical well installation for a service of this type. The cost was $15K for the well or wells plus $5K for design/consultation services, for a total of $20K. In some cases, the cost could be higher if the well(s) need to be a lot deeper, if water treatment is needed, or if storage system(s) are needed to provide that the flow rates.

Several committee members questioned the feasibility of being able to get a well in this area that will have the needed gallons per minute flow capacity to meet the needs of the system. They are going to review the geologic maps of the area to get a rough estimate of the difficulties that can be expected to be encountered.

We are going to have another meeting in two weeks to review each of these issues.

Budget Summary

We were doing relatively well with the budget, until we hit these various cost adders. Business Administrator Mike Trojano will be putting together another cost roll-up for our next meeting, but this is where I think that we are based on a rough update of the previous roll-ups.

We had been at around $250K of unallocated contingency funds at the last roll-up. Subtracting out $13K for the approved changes, $35K for the annunciator panel, $30K for extra bleacher foundations, $5K for a negotiated water entrance fee, and $20K for a well for irrigation, leaves about $145K of unallocated contingency funds.

There is another large issue that is pending, and this is that many of the doors that we had thought had been included in the bid process were actually not part of the bid. The only doors that were included were ones that were attached or next to areas that were being worked on separately. Doors for rooms that were not otherwise being renovated were not included.

The cost for renovating these extra doors is still being scoped out. Many of them are very expensive to renovate since they are non-standard sized and new door frames are needed to get new doors installed.

It is my opinion that renovating the doors is one of the higher priorities of the overall project. The current doors cannot be locked from the inside, and in a school lock-down mode, the occupants of the room would have to go into the corridors to lock the doors, thus exposing them to any potential threats. Adding more doors for the project could be as much as $50K-100K.

This lack of unallocated contingency is getting very tight for this portion of the project, as there are still a few areas that have not even been touched as of yet. There may be more unanticipated problems to be found.

We are carrying $82K for parking improvements in the budget, and we have not tapped in to this at all yet. We have done no work so far in designing what will be done for parking improvements. This is an area that could be a safety valve if needed to accommodate unanticipated expenditures. If we have to cut something from the project, then this might be an area that could be attacked.

We should have a better idea on the overall project costs when we meet again in two weeks.