Sticker shock: The School Board wrestles with $18 million in increased estimated costs for school renovations
The higher cost estimates would push the price of improvements to Brevard and Rosman campuses far beyond the $68 million approved by voters; the board seeks changes in the plans to cut costs.
Dan DeWitt
BREVARD — At a Transylvania County Commission meeting in May, Commissioner Larry Chapman asked how rising construction costs might alter the $68-million plan to renovate Brevard High School and Rosman High and Middle schools.
“It was presented in a recent meeting that material prices have increased roughly 30 percent,” Chapman said. “Well, what impact is that going to have on the old plan?”
The county School Board received the answer last week: A very big impact.
After seeking bids from suppliers and subcontractors, the project’s contractor, Vannoy Construction of Asheville, estimated the costs of the project — work on which had been expected to start this summer — would soar by $18.2 million.
The higher price tag forced the board to delay construction, asking Vannoy and designer Clark Nexsen Architecture to seek cost-saving modifications to the plan.
And at its regular meeting on Monday, the board learned that even its previous timeline — based partly on the hopes that the construction market will settle with the passing of the Covid-19 pandemic — might be too optimistic.
“There’s no question we will have to rebid the project when (the firms modify it),” Board member Kimsey Jackson said Monday. “That will take place in the spring and hopefully we’ll be under construction next year.”
Maybe next year, said Norris Barger, the district’s director of business services.
“I would like to rebid in spring, but that may not happen,” he told the board on Monday. “That’s my target but that’s not necessarily the hard date.”
If last week’s meeting was about sticker shock, Monday’s meeting was about dealing with the aftershock. Board members parsed the terms that best described the cost overruns and learned more about the next steps for the project.
NewsBeat, after sending a public records request to the district, also received a document that summarized the higher bid prices that Vannoy had received.
The biggest source of the increases were for materials such as structural steel, which jumped from $4.7 million to $7.9 million, and drywall, the estimated price of which more than doubled, from $3 million to $7.8 million, the document said.
The total of the project cost — not including a contingency that allows the contractor to absorb small cost overruns as well as so-called soft costs such as insurance and permitting — originally came to $62.3 million; the new estimate based on bids received by Vannoy had climbed to $77.7 million.
An additional line item labeled “market volatility contingency” brought the total estimate to $80.5 million, or more than 29 percent higher than the original projection, according to the bid summary.
Board member Courtney Domokur said that the increase should not be considered a “budget” overrun because the district had not given Vannoy the go-ahead to start working.
“Our budget will not exceed $68 million,” she said. “This is just an estimate.”
Jackson said that, no matter how the increases are described, the district faces $18.2 million more in expenses.
“That’s just a play on words to me,” he said.
He urged Barger to push Vannoy and Clark Nexson to return with a revised plan as soon as possible.
“They’ve lived with this thing for at least two years,” he said. “They ought to be able to do that reasonably quickly, say four to six weeks.”
County voters approved a ballot measure in November of 2018 to issue $68 million in bonds for a comprehensive renovation of the Brevard and Rosman campuses. But the school district had earlier found that millions of dollars worth of upgrades were also needed at the district's other schools — which led to a point of agreement among all three of the board members who attended Monday’s meeting:
The school board should not spread the bond money around to pay for smaller improvements across the district, which is a common suggestion in the community, Domokur said. That would mean wasting design and other pre-construction costs already devoted to the Rosman and Brevard upgrades, she said.
Transylvania County, which will issue the bonds and in 2019 raised taxes to cover their payments, has so far received project-related invoices totaling nearly $3.2 million, said county Finance Director Jonathan Griffin.
“We don’t need to Band-Aid any of this stuff,” Jackson said, affirming Domokur’s opinion. “That’s just throwing good money out the window.”
The board will have to deal with other needed improvements once these jobs are completed, he added: “When we get this fixed, we will still have seven more schools to work with and it’s not going to be easy.”
He also expressed doubts that the cost estimates would decrease by the time Vannoy seeks another round of bids for the work. Barger, after the meeting, sounded more hopeful. He said that many firms have been spooked by the pandemic-related volatility of labor and material costs and that the bids to Vannoy might reflect this temporary uncertainty.
“I think a lot of what we are seeing now is the fear factor,” he said.
The County Commission had been scheduled to decide next Monday whether to issue the bonds for the project. That decision has been delayed indefinitely, said County Manager Jaime Laughter, and instead school officials are due to present the new cost estimates at that meeting.
But Griffin had repeatedly asked for that information from the school and had not received it, Laughter wrote in an email last week, though “all of the project information and documents are public records under NC law.”
Also, the district did not provide documentation to support the board’s discussion last week or this week — at least until it received a public records request.
Barger said that was because Vannoy had received bids from subcontractors only days before last week’s meeting and these bids had not been fully vetted. The summary is labeled a “preliminary draft,” and a school attorney had determined that, until it had been publicly discussed, it was a “working” document not subject to the state’s public records law, Barger said.
Jackson, after this week’s meeting, said he understood those concerns, but pushed for as much transparency as possible to inform taxpayers of this important and expensive project.
“I don’t understand the reluctance to release documents,” he said.
Also, said C. Amanda Martin, general counsel for the North Carolina Press Association, it’s the law.
Records collected by a private company on behalf of a public agency can remain private, she said— but not once this information has been provided to that agency.
“The starting point is, it’s a public record if it’s in the hands of a public agency or public official,” Martin said. “The information the contractor did pass back is public.”
Gone Hiking:
Usually in this space I urge readers to contact me. This week, I’m heading to the AT for a short backpacking trip with my older son, Noah. I will return all emails and calls over the weekend. Thanks for understanding.