Northampton Supervisors & School board develop two pronged approach to school bid woes

Two somewhat obvious solutions were agreed to by consensus at a joint meeting of the Northampton Board of Supervisors and the School Board Tuesday evening regarding the bids for school renovation which came in $30 million higher than expected.

Get more bids and cut expenses.

“This board has its arms around $60 million, but you have some work to do,” said Supervisor Dixon Leatherbury to the School Board. “The re-bid plan is a solid plan, but there needs to be some other efforts in the background.”

Part of the issue with the much higher than expected bids were the lack of actual bids.

“We should have had 6-10 bids,” said Northampton Schools Director of Operations Chris Truckner. “But we only got two.”

“There’s a lot of government dollars chasing only a few jobs,” replied Leatherbury.

The School Board acknowledged the financial limitations of the county of 12,000 people.

“We are all in common agreement $85 million is more than we can afford,” said School Board member Helene Doughty. “We have to reconsider everything.”

One supervisor also took aim at the architect firm Waller, Todd & Sadler.

“Waller, Todd & Sadler let us down… I think we should fire them,” said John Coker. “We need a cookie cutter middle school with a shared gym & cafeteria with the high school.”

Various ideas were presented by Dane Siegel, a representative of Skanska. Going to entirely new construction is projected to come in around $77.6 million. Estimates for a new phased construction implemented over time had not been formulated by the time of the presentation.

The two bodies agreed to go review the plan and go back to bid in the spring of 2023.

One bright spot for the County is they have already borrowed $53 million for the project before recent hikes in interest rates. Finance Director John Chandler presented a chart which showed had Northampton waited till today for their bond sales, the total cost of borrowing would have increased by approximately $22 million.