High School Renovation Project

We held another meeting last night of the High School Renovation Committee. The purpose of the meeting was to review the bids that came in for "Phase 1" of the track portion of the project. Phase 1 is primarily for the site work and field aspects of the project.

In summary, the budget for the track and field portion of the overall project is $945k, not including any contingency funds or other soft costs. Our current best estimate for this portion of the project (including items that were bid and place holders for items that were not bid) is $1,274k, or $328k higher than budgeted.

This was based on awarding the site work contract to Leighton White, who bid roughly $619k for the site work, while the next lowest bid of the five received was roughly $697k for the same work.

It was disappointing to get such bad news right at the start of the project, but I don't think that it is a killer to the overall project. There are some things that we can do to ease the pain.

While we don't really have a good explanation as to why the bids were so much higher than our planning budget that was used for the budget, our best guess is that the drainage portion of the project ended up being much more complicated than originally envisioned. The final design included a new separate retention area for the water overflow whereas the original thought was that we could just use the retention pond just below the Middle School. The elevations were such that the existing area was too high to make it work, so a new retention area closer to West street was needed.

We made a couple of changes to the project during the meeting to help solve this cost problem. We decided to eliminate the Clerk of the Works position to save $54k. (We did not actually vote to do this at the meeting, but it is highly likely that we will do so at a future meeting.) The position is not really required since we decided to go with a Construction Manager arrangement instead of strictly using a general contractor. The Construction Manager and our own on-site personnel will keep tabs on the project instead. Having a Clerk of the Works might be marginally better than not having one, but it doesn't seem like it is worth the $54k that it would cost.

We spent a lot of time talking about track surfaces. The original plan was for a urethane based surface, and that is what was included in the estimate. We decided to change to a red-colored latex surface instead of going with the urethane surface. The information that we had was that the latex surface would probably need more frequent maintenance actions than the urethane, but the maintenance would be less expensive each time. The urethane might last longer than the latex, but no one could give us any hard numbers as to how long either surface would last. Both surfaces come with a five-year warranty, so from that perspective, they are about equal. Changing to red-colored latex saves $52k in installation cost as compared to the urethane. Latex seems to be the surface of choice for high schools in this area, with Bedford and Pinkerton both planning on installing latex for their recent projects.

We talked about using a blue surface instead of red just to get it to match our school colors, but supposedly the blue color fades fairly quickly while the red seems to be relatively color-fast. We were given a list of 11 schools that had a latex track, and 9 were red and 2 were blue. We decided that color-fastness was more important than matching the school colors.

Eliminating the Clerk of the Works, and changing the track to latex saved a total of $106k, bringing our cost problem down to $223k. The contingency on the project is budgeted at 15% of the construction costs. The 15% contingency associated with the $945k is $141k. If we apply all of that contingency to this portion of the project, then that decreases the cost problem down to $82k. One hates to tap into contingency so early in the process, but that is what it is for so we might as well go for it now since it is needed.

There are still a number of items that are in the cost build-up with a place-holder number that is an estimate and not an actual bid. One of the bigger items is the bleachers, with a place-holder number of $150k for a 680 seat bleacher on the home side and a 320 seat bleacher on the visitor side. This compares to the roughly 400 home/200 visitor set-up we have today. This $150k figure may be more or less once the bids come in. If we really needed the savings, then would could downsize the bleachers a bit to save cost. For example, it was estimated that changing to a 560 home/200 visitor set-up would save about $35k.

The committee voted to award the bid to Leighton White and to therefore move ahead with the project using the current designs. We will have to deal with the remaining $82k cost problem in some manner on the project, but we left that task to a later date once we get better figures for the other items.

The School Board will review this on Monday, and make a final decision on whether to award the contract to Leighton White. Assuming they do, then it is likely that Leighton will start work soon after Labor Day, We are going to have one final home football game at home on August 31st, so he can't start before then. There may be other issues that delay him a bit, but the work should begin soon.