BUILDING BLOCKS: Items protected from cuts in SPHS construction plan

SOUTH PORTLAND — Although the architectural landscape is shifting by the day, and even by the hour, as South Portland school officials look to make budget on $47.3 million high school renovation project, at least two cost centers won’t be touched – Beal Gym and energy-efficient design.

“There were many votes that were made predicated on promises that were made,” said Councilor Tom Blake, praising the early call. “To reneg on any of those right now would be poor choices. Promises made to the community have to be kept.”

In a presentation to the City Council Monday evening, Superintendent Suzanne Godin said neither the gym renovation nor the certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design would be cut as the building committee looks to bridge a $4 million gap between the $39.26 million budgeted for construction and the $43.24 million low bid received by PC Construction.

“PC asked us if there were any sacred cows,” said architect-of-record Dan Cecil, of Portland-based Harriman Associates, referring to preliminary meetings held to bridge the budget gap. “We said, yeah, one of the sacred cows is that we do nothing to compromise the energy efficiency of the building, or the LEED application. Nothing will be done to do that.”

Also, despite a suggestion by school board member Jeffrey Selser that it might be worth it to tear down the George Ernest Beal Gymnasium,  Godin says that’s also off limits.

“No, we’re not even considering that,” she said.

“I haven’t run the numbers, but I’m convinced that it would cost substantially more to tear down the gym and build a new one in its place,” said Cecil.

When the high school renovation project was launched nearly a decade ago, the original proposal was to build a new gym and retain the 1950s-era icon as a practice gym. That idea was shot down by voters who wanted it kept as a focal point of the new school. However, according to Harriman’s senior project manager, Dan Robbins, the gym ended up being “in much, much worse shape than we knew before the [2010] referendum.”

Although Robbins stresses that the building is not unsafe, a number of issues were uncovered as Harriman fine-tuned its engineering plans in preparation for bidding out the project.

Harriman knew certain things had to be done. All electrical, mechanical and plumbing systems were “outdated and scheduled to be removed,” said Robbins. Touching the gym also meant triggering a legal requirement to bring it up to code, including replacing and reinforcing the roof over both the gym and the lobby to handle snow loads.

A crack in the northwest wall that Robbins said runs from the roof to the lower-level locker room, and straight through from inside out, was caused because the building sits on about 30 feet of shifting marine clay. While not dangerous now, that corner would not take the load of the new roof, Robbins said. That means reinforcing the wall with rebar and re-pointing the brickwork.

“There’s a good month’s worth of work in that wall, top to bottom, that was never in the original schedule,” said Robbins.

It was also discovered that the corner pilings sunk through the clay and into the bedrock are freestanding, not braced and interlocked together, as required by modern codes. Meanwhile, Harriman determined that the back wall of the gym, where new locker rooms will connect it to the new school, does not have the strength to act as a load-bearing wall. That means a special cantilever construction method that will send stress from the new roof “up and over” the unreinforced wall, essentially bypassing it.

Other structural load issues will require “special, welded reinforced connections” of roof columns and flanges, Robbins said.

“We knew what kind of structure it was, so we provided money in the initial concept to reinforce the roof,” Robbins said. “But most of the early effort was in the new addition. What we discovered when we got into a more in-depth look was more than just improperly ventilated locker rooms. The shell and frame was really showing its age, because you did not have the design requirements back then like you do today. So, we have to bring the building up to code.”

Cecil said that will add “more than six figures” to initial estimates for the Beal Gym section of the renovation – meaning additional dollars that will have to be cut elsewhere in order for available funds to see eye to eye with PC Construction’s estimate.

“Oftentimes in the past we’ve had a tendency to go cheap,” said Councilor Alan Livingston, who was kicked off the building committee last fall because of his instance on an athletic washroom. “I hope that we don’t cut so much that we have problems in the future, that we end up with a problem we have to take care of later, which we have not always done in the past.”

Livingston also asked if it would be possible to house ninth-graders at the city’s two middle schools, given that one of Cecil’s oft-cited reason’s for the higher-than-expected bid is a concern regarding the complexity of the project. If students could be kept off site entirely, instead of creating stops and starts in construction as they’re moved from old to new sections of the building, it would be less of a nuisance to the project.

“Although not ideal,” he said, a similar scheme was used decades ago when students were swapped between the original 1952 section of the high school, at the corner of Highland Avenue and Mountain View Road, and Mahoney Middle School, when it was the high school.

However, Godin said that idea will not work.

“I’ve looked at the numbers and the problem is that our middle school enrollment is actually increasing, while our high school has two more years of decreasing numbers,” she said. “Our numbers at the middle schools are actually going up substantially.”

Instead, Cecil said, his team has already begun hammering out “more than 200” cost-cutting ideas with PC estimators and executives. As those ideas are explored, results will be brought to the building committee at its March 8 and 15 informational meetings.

The building committee is slated to begin making cuts to the scope of work at meetings to be held at 6:30 p.m. on March 20-21, in the high school library.