The West Elementary School Building Committee could ask special town meeting for as much as $19 million to cover cost overruns on the $151.6 million project, which is scheduled to open at the start of the 2024-25 school year.
“The options are very limited,” West El building committee chair Joel Blumstein said last week. If approved, the additional funding would add about $82 in taxes to the average Andover homeowner’s property tax bill for the next 30 years.
The committee will ask the Andover Select Board to open a special town meeting warrant at Monday night’s select board meeting to fund the cost overruns estimated at 14 percent above budget. The overruns which are attributed to global supply chain and inflation issues. The request comes at the same time the Andover High School Building Committee looks to renovate or rebuild the school without state funding.
The $19 million includes $17.1 million in added construction costs, $1.5 million for increased construction contingencies and $430,0000 for owner contingency costs.
“This is the ballpark we’re in,” Blumstein said, noting the actual request could be lower as details are hammered out in the coming weeks. “It could come down…we do not want to have to go back to town meeting another time.”
At Wednesday’s committee meeting, Town Manager Andrew Flanagan said the additional funding needs to be secured by the end of the calendar year. He noted that if the select board agrees to open a special town meeting Monday, there is a “good eight weeks” before it can be held to allow for finance committee review and mailings to 14,000 Andover households.
Flanagan said if the select board calls a special town meeting, it would most likely be held in early December.
That means in addition to special town meeting, the additional funding would need to be approved by voters in a ballot question “unless the [Massachusetts] Department of Revenue gives us permission to adjust that approval,” Flanagan said. The town would have to demonstrate the need for the additional funding was solely because of economic conditions.
“I think our case would be very strong,” Flanagan said.
Twelve of the 15 trade bids received on Aug. 29 came in over budget. The town needs to negotiate with the low bidders and ask them to hold their bids until the additional funding can be secured from special town meeting. Otherwise, those portions of the project will have to go back out to bid.
At the West El building committee’s meeting Wednesday, member Lorraine Finnegan said other Massachusetts school building projects were facing similar pressures with bids, on average, coming in 12 to 15 percent higher than budget projections.
“Other communities are feeling it as well,” Finnegan said. “Other communities are in the same situation as Andover….it doesn’t matter if you’re a high school in the city or an elementary school in the suburbs. Everyone is feeling the same impact.”
Over the summer, the committee closed a $5.5 million budget deficit by scaling back certain elements of the project and tapping into the project’s $9.5 million construction contingency fund. The project was originally budgeted at $151.6 million project, including $119.2 million in actual construction costs.
The project is getting $38.4 billion from the Massachusetts School Building Authority. The state will not increase that grant, despite the unanticipated project cost increases.
As late as an August finance committee meeting, Blumstein said the committee had resisted going back to town meeting to ask for more money. But the committee was also committed to not making cuts that would impact education at the new school.
At last week’s meeting, Blumstein said the committee had identified about $5.9 million in additional cuts that could be made. But those cuts would include greenhouses, gym equipment, and athletic fields and “are things we absolutely do not want to take out of the project,” Blumstein said. “That doesn;t seem like the right way to deal with this.”
“Someone suggested we go out to rebid,” Blumstein said. “But I think that would result in higher bids. Similarly, putting the project on hold, I’m not sure what that would accomplish; when we got back to that prices would probably be higher.”