School Board Opts for Much New Construction, Little Renovation, in Revised Schools Plans
The new options for upgrading the Brevard and Rosman campuses were chosen to limit costs that would come from rising building prices and redrawing plans.
BREVARD — Facing the prospect of more of the pandemic-related cost increases that are forcing major cuts to its school-renovation plans, the Transylvania County School Board on Tuesday chose a revised approach aimed at getting the work started as soon as possible.
The Board agreed on Tuesday to stick with most of the originally proposed new construction and forgo most of the renovations envisioned for Brevard High School and Rosman High and Middle schools.
This tack, Board members said, will maximize the amount of new building the district receives for the $68 million that voters approved for the project in 2018. It will also limit additional design costs and, maybe most important, minimize the impact of relentless inflation in material and labor costs.
“With the construction climate as it is right now, (the price) is not going to get any better,” said Board member Courtney Domokur, in comments that set the course of the discussion.
The special meeting on Tuesday was the culmination of months of scrambling that started in July, when the Board was told that Covid-19-related disruptions had pushed the bids for the work $18.2 million higher than anticipated.
That forced the job’s architectural firm, Clark Nexsen, to produce the several money-saving revisions it offered at the meeting.
Broadly speaking, some of the options envisioned cutting more new construction to reserve funds for renovations. The options the Board chose called for few of those incremental upgrades and all of the new construction originally planned at Rosman and about 75 percent of the new work at Brevard.
Because the approach will not require as much redrawing of blueprints, work in Rosman can likely begin in June and in Brevard by next fall.
“It gives us more new construction and we’re looking at buildings there that are pretty old,” Vice Chair Ron Kiviniemi said of the Rosman campus. “And it allows us . . . to start earlier and complete the projects earlier.”
The new proposal for Brevard will address the campus’ most urgent needs — replacing the cafeteria and auxiliary gym that were both built in 1959 and that are targeted for demolition under both old and new plans.
These facilities, along with a new media center and administrative offices, will be housed in a freshly constructed 61,000-square-foot building costing an estimated $23 million dollars.
The need for savings, however, forced the district to cut plans to demolish and replace the current career technical education (CTE) wing. It also leaves less than $1 million for renovations at the rest of the campus.
The original proposal for Rosman called for the demolition of much of the old middle school and for a new high school building to rise in its place, as well as an extensive renovation of the former high school building. The plan is and was for this to serve as the new middle school.
The new construction will continue as anticipated, according to the revised plan chosen by the Board. But the vision of reconfigured future middle school classrooms with access to modern communications connections and equipment — shared by the district’s now-retired lead on the project, Norris Barger, during a tour of the building in August — will be scrapped.
Under the “pros” of this approach, listed in documents provided to board members and requested by NewsBeat, it will meet the goal of providing “a variety of 21st century learning environments for (the) high school.”
The same cannot be said for the new middle school, the document implied, listing one of the “cons” as “minimal renovation to existing buildings.”
The Board’s vote came after Brian Walker, of Vannoy Construction — the contractor for the project — informed the board that costs of building materials and labor “are continuing to go up.”
But, he added, they are “not going up at the same rate and pace they were going up in February through May.”
Because of this slight leveling, and because the companies had calculated continued price increases into the latest estimates, he said, these should not be dramatically exceeded by bid prices from subcontractors and suppliers.
But he also could not guarantee that the bids will come in at or under the budgeted amount.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have that crystal ball,” Walker said.
Board Chair Tawny McCoy raised the prospect that the district will be able to pay for some renovations from the “capital outlay” funds approved annually by the Transylvania County Commission. These total about $1.6 million in the current fiscal year.
Commissioner Larry Chapman, who spoke at the meeting, did his best to dash these hopes.
Considering recent tax increases, including one designed to fund the bonds that will pay for the project, he said, “I don’t know where any money would come from to increase the capital outlay.”
And though he said he wasn’t speaking for the Commission, he floated the possibility that it would not approve bonds for such drastically altered plans.
He told McCoy he “would highly recommend” that she set up a joint meeting with the Board and Commission “to make sure (the Commission) is committed, based on your plans here and what our citizens want, to move this bond forward . . . We’re in dire straits here.”
McCoy, however, said that by choosing the new approach the board was doing the best it could to fulfill voters’ wishes in the face of unforeseen cost increases.
“This escalation that happened . . . is completely out of the control of the architects, the construction company and the Board of Education,” she said.
“I don’t like it. I hate it. But I feel like we have to move forward.”