More Time, Less Work: Delays and Rising Costs Mean Further Cuts to School Project
In the face of climbing construction costs, the Transylvania County School Board approved a plan that will further trim the scope of renovations at the Brevard and Rosman campuses.
BREVARD — Transylvania County School Board members have warned the County Commission since January that each month of delay was adding more cost to the voter-approved, $68-million school renovation project.
Tuesday it learned roughly how much more:
“In the projects we have been bidding, we have seen about a 1 percent increase per month,” said Chad Roberson, of the project’s architectural firm, Clark Nexsen.
Rising construction prices have “absorbed” the cost cushions Clark Nexsen had built into the earlier, scaled-back plan the Board approved in January, he said at a special meeting held Tuesday to discuss the project.
That means the plan needs further cuts, though he also anticipated these will be comparatively minor, possibly including reduced site work at Brevard High School and the elimination of a bridge planned to allow students to walk between the two other schools targeted for upgrades, Rosman High and Rosman Middle schools.
This, in turn, means more time and money for planning.
Roberson said he will provide information about additional planning costs in time for the Board to consider them at its meeting later this month. Mobilizing the architectural team and identifying money-saving changes — and allowing the project’s contractor, Vannoy Construction, to confirm these savings on the market — will require at least three months after this course of action is fully approved, he said.
With Board members seeing no other choice, they voted to “approve a limited contract amendment” to proceed with this process, according to the motion. In the roll-call vote, all board members voted “yes,” with one of them, Kimsey Jackson, registering his vote as, “reluctantly, yes.”
The motion also called for the Board to request that it and the County Commission create a “facilities committee” to make recommendations about the project and address the district’s many other capital needs.
Even the action approved Tuesday will need the backing of the Commission, which means more of the back-and-forth between the Board and Commission that has contributed to the gap between the time voters approved the bond issue for the projects in 2018 and work that will now begin, according to Roberson, in the spring of 2023 at the earliest.
The Board’s attorney, Chris Campbell, started the meeting by presenting the timeline of the project. The Covid-19 pandemic delayed the start of a previously approved plan that called for extensive renovation at both campuses as well as new construction such as the replacement of the badly deteriorated, 63-year-old auxiliary gym and cafeteria at Brevard, and a new high school building in Rosman.
By the time bids for this work came in last summer, the total cost had climbed $18 million higher than expected. In January, the Board approved the revised proposal, now called “Option 1,” that retained most of the new construction but eliminated most of the renovations — as well as a new career and technical education (CTE) wing that had been planned at Brevard.
When the Commission, after months of closed meetings, approved the amended contracts for Vannoy and Clark Nexsen needed to proceed with this plan on June 20, it added conditions that Board members and Schools Superintendent Jeff McDaris said were so complicated that they would need to be deciphered by Campbell.
But the Commission’s motion also seemed to say that it required all the work of Option 1 to be completed at no additional cost, Campbell said after the meeting. “So the motion wasn’t realistic to begin with.”
The other stipulations “were not even addressed tonight, because the question is: Is the county even willing to look at a reduced scope?” he said. “The rest of it is moot.”
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