High School Renovation Project

The MHS Project Management Advisory Committee held their monthly meeting yesterday to review the status of the ongoing renovations at the High School. Everything seems to be moving along well, with the overall project appearing to be on budget and on schedule.

Track and Field Update

Good progress was made on the track and field portion of the project during the fall months. Most of the major field work was completed, the drainage was installed, some fencing was put up, old bleachers were torn down, excess loam was removed from the site, lights were moved, subsurface and base coat for the track were installed, and the foundation for the storage building was installed.

Work has stopped on the site for the winter, except that the ATC construction program will be starting to construct the storage building soon. When the weather improves, they will start up again. Some of the major activities to be done include finishing off the track surface, building an appropriate foundation and installing bleachers, installing the press box, electrical and data feeds to the press box and scoreboard, and installing sod.

Most of the work should be completed by late spring or early summer. The football field will be rested for a while to allow the sod to take. It is expected that the field will be in great shape in time for the next football season.

High School Renovations Update

There are a number of renovation activities that will occur in the High School. Some activities have occurred over the past couple of months and will continue through the school year, but most of the activity will occur during the next summer.

The band room renovation is coming along well. It was gutted, new walls put up, stage storage area was constructed, stage handicapped lift area constructed, drainage put in, and practice rooms were created. The instrument storage system will be installed soon.

There are several interior rooms that are in progress. We ran into a minor snag in a couple of the rooms in that the roof supports turned out to be inverted wooden trusses instead of steel as had be expected. Some rooftop units were being installed, so they had to figure out a way to beef up the support structure to handle all the loads. They did come up with an approach that is safe and relatively inexpensive.

Bales Roof

The contract for the replacement of the Bales roof was given to Turnstone Corp, the construction manager for the high school project. The work will be done next summer.

Financial Update

The high school project is largely a renovation project, and it is always difficult to be exact on the costs up front since you never know what you are going to run into. There have been some items that were more expensive than expected and others that were lower, but in total, our best estimate at this time is that we have roughly $200k that is not spoken for as of yet, out of the $4,900k total project budget. There are quite a few items that still have place holder values in the cost roll-up, so this is subject to considerable change as we go through the project. In very rough numbers, we have committed spending of about $4,400k so far, with another $500k remaining to be committed.

The project management committee has worked well at making decisions to keep the project on budget. Priority decisions have been made, and in my opinion, good choices have been made.

The project seems to be in good financial shape at this point, with the majority of the big cost items mostly set, with only minor activities still up in the air.