Boiling Over: School Board, Commission Air Disagreements about Renovations

Some Transylvania County commissioners and School Board members are at odds over numerous facets of the voter-approved, $68 million renovation of the Brevard and Rosman campuses.

Brevard High School, one of two Transylvania County Schools’ campuses targeted in a voter-approved $68 million renovation project

BREVARD — At Monday night’s Transylvania County School Board Meeting, Vice Chair Ron Kiviniemi asked for time to “vent.”

Despite the Board’s best efforts to move ahead with work on the voter-approved, $68-million renovation of Brevard High School and Rosman high and middle schools, he said, the County Commission has repeatedly dragged its feet.

It’s doing so again, he continued, by failing to sign off on amended contracts for the project’s contractor and architect. That must happen before work can proceed on scaled-back renovation plans the Board settled on after bids for the original proposal came in $18.2 million higher than expected last July.

With costs still climbing, further delay threatens even these revised plans, Kiviniemi said:

“I encouraged the commissioners to move forward as soon as possible to approve these contracts and that has not happened . . . I’m frustrated beyond belief.”

His comments are the latest sign that the two sides’ long-simmering dispute about the project have recently boiled over. Now the Board and Commission, or at least their most vocal members, openly disagree on a range of issues, including renovation priorities, responsibility for the nearly three-and-a-half year delay in starting the work, and the amount to be spent on fees for the contractor and, especially, the architect.

Not everyone is on the warpath. The Commission framed the decision to seek a second opinion from an independent consultant about whether those fees meet industry standards — approved at a special meeting on March 31 — as a simple safeguard of taxpayers’ investments.

And Board Chair Tawny McCoy said Monday she hoped to receive this consultant’s answer, which would allow work to proceed, before the end of April.

Kiviniemi was less optimistic.

“I don’t want to see us end up in a court of law on this issue, but I’m at the point of being ready to advocate for that,” he said.

The Fees

Commissioner Larry Chapman has repeatedly criticized the nearly $3.3 million the County has already spent on fees for the project’s architect, Clark Nexsen, and other expenses.

Commission Vice Chair Jake Dalton, meanwhile, has questioned the percentage of the $68 million that will not go directly into construction.

Clark Nexson and the project’s contractor, Vannoy Construction, will be paid a total of about $7.7 million over the life of the project, or more than 11 percent of the total bond amount, according to documents provided by County Manager Jaime Laughter. Nearly $1.4 million of that would come from the added costs of the new plans, Laughter wrote.

Those figures justify the Commission’s decision to seek a second opinion from an independent architectural firm about these costs, Dalton said.

“I find these fees high based on my experience dealing with construction contracts in my professional career,” Dalton, who runs an insurance agency, wrote in an email this week.

He is less concerned about Vannoy’s fees than Clark Nexsen’s, he said in an interview after this week’s School Board meeting, and by seeking input from a consultant, commissioners are simply “hoping to get somebody unaffiliated with us or the Schools to say thumbs up or thumbs down.”

That was Commission Chair Jason Chappell’s message in an email he wrote to McCoy after the vote. The second opinion, he wrote, “will provide the county taxpayers the necessary assurance that the amount requested is in keeping with the industry standard and the realities of the current market.”

But that assurance has already been provided by the Board’s lawyer, Chris Campbell, who negotiated the contracts with Vannoy and Clark Nexsen and has long experience doing such work for school districts throughout Western North Carolina, said Kiviniemi and Schools Superintendent Jeff McDaris.

Seeking a second opinion is “is a waste of time and is also disrespectful of the School Board,” said Alice Wellborn, a former Board member who has encouraged members of the public to write emails urging prompt action from commissioners.

Misleading Messages?

Those emails have raised another point of disagreement — one that has even divided the Commission.

Chapman’s responses to residents have “misstated the facts over and over again,” Commissioner David Guice said at the March 28 meeting.

“I am very disturbed by the misinformation that is being put out and how it is being put out,” he said, “because it does a disservice to the Board of County Commissioners and a disservice to the elected School Board members who are trying to work hard for this community.”

Though Guice didn’t elaborate, Wellborn, who was on the Board when the bond referendum passed, provided some of these emails to NewsBeat and highlighted what she said were their inaccuracies.

Most have to do with statements from Chapman — who declined a request to clarify his positions — that the Board has the power to move forward without the Commission’s approval and that the Schools are solely to blame for the holdups.

“The delays have not been caused by anything the (Commission) has done,” Chapman wrote in one email. “The real questions need to be asked to the (Board) as to how we are where we are after 3 ½ years since the bond (was) approved and not a spoon of dirt moved.”

In another he wrote, “I have not seen any additional ‘contract modifications’ that the (Board) needs approval (for), over what was agreed to in the beginning, which gave the (Board) full control over everything except getting the bond issues.”

The 2019 interlocal agreement between the Board and Commission does give Schools power over the design and construction. But it generally gives the Commission power over funding, as does — in some circumstances — state law, Laughter wrote in an email accompanying that document, which she provided in July.

“There are pieces of financial responsibilities that cannot be delegated under state law and that includes the bond sale process and commissioners authorizing any agreements/contracts that are in effect over more than one fiscal year,” she wrote.

Waiting on authorization for the amended contracts, which the Board approved on January 24, is one example of the delay, said Wellborn and Kiviniemi.

Maybe even more crucial, Kiviniemi said, was the time that passed in approving the original contracts for Vannoy and Clark Nexsen. The bids for the project came back far over the estimated amount because, more than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, costs of labor and building supplies had soared, Board members have said.

Kiviniemi said that wouldn’t have happened if the Commission had quickly approved the original contracts after the Board agreed to them on Sept. 3 of 2019. Instead, it didn’t vote on them until Jan. 13, 2020, he said at Monday’s meeting.

“Just that four months of delay pushed us into an unfavorable bidding environment in 2021.”

Questioning Plans

Wellborn’s comments at the start of the Commission meeting on March 28 led Chapman to air his grievances about the renovation plans themselves.

By failing to approve the amended contracts, Wellborn said, the Commission was exercising “bad faith towards the voters, the School Board and the children of Transylvania County.”

“Don’t tell me we don’t care about the kids,” Chapman responded.

The wording the voters approved called for issuing $68 million in bonds for “constructing, renovating, equipping and improving school facilities, including Brevard High School, Rosman Middle School and Rosman High School.”

Chapman said this allows the possibility of broadening the project's focus to the district’s other schools, all of which are in need of upgrades.

He especially questioned the aims for the renovation at the Brevard campus, which include the demolition and replacement of the old auxiliary gym and the cafeteria. Both were built in 1959 and have degraded enough that they represent a potential safety risk to students, a district consultant has found.

But the result is a project that delivers far less than “Mr. and Mrs. Citizen were told they were going to get,” and that will limit improvements to “a new administration wing and a new gymnasium and, I guess, a new place to eat,” Chapman said.

Because the planned replacement of the school’s career and technical education (CTE) wing was scrapped in the revision, he added, the plan does “nothing to address CTE, which is the most critical need in our schools.”

When Board members voted for the revised plan last year, all of them said they were unhappy about the cuts, but said the option they chose was the best to preserve as much new construction as possible in the face of rising building costs.

And at Monday’s meeting, Kiviniemi reasserted that the board has power over approval of the project’s design.

“A few, not all, of the commissioners want to dictate the decisions that the School Board makes,” he said. “And if that is their desire, I strongly encourage them to run for School Board.”

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