The School Building Committee voted this week to establish a priority list of features that may be eliminated to keep the $36 million school building project within budget.
Kevin Sullivan, vice chairman of both the School Committee and School Building Committee, said the project manager, Paul H. Kneedler of Skanska USA Building, Inc., also set a time line for contract bids, to identify the project’s general contractor and subcontractors, at the committee’s Monday meeting.
“The bids will go out in June and shovels in the ground in August,” Sullivan said.
“It was a good meeting, well-organized and informative, so we’re on our way.
“We did rank priorities for alternate bid items, so if we have to cut we have a priority list of things we want to keep and things we could cut,” he said.
Ward 2 City Councilor James E. Brown Jr., in whose ward the school site is located and who is a voting member of the building committee, said several items presented by Architect Margo Jones were cut from the subcontractor list because the city can provide those elements at a lower cost. One of those elements is a storage shed for outdoor equipment to be constructed near the kitchen area.
“We came to the conclusion that the Voke kids could do it for less than the $21,600 in the budget,” Brown said. “You’ve got to love those Voke kids. I’m a fan of giving them projects like this; it’s a great learning experience, so we pushed the storage shed to them. They’ll have the pavilion project next year, and this the year after.”
Brown said that Jones proposed reducing the number of trees to be planted.
“I think that Margo (Jones) got a good idea of what is important to the community, that trees are very important in this city and we don’t want to cut them out of the project,” Brown said. “But the city has been buying and planting a lot of trees, so we feel that we can get them for less than the $1,200 per tree in the budget.”
Brown said another option may be to involve students of the Westfield Vocational-Technical High School horticultural program, which has a tree farm on Water Resource Department land in Granville, in that phase of the project, providing another real-world learning opportunity for those students.
“I think we’ll come in under budget (for the general contractor) and be able to get everything we want, and there will be money for the items on the (priority) list,” Brown said.
