Maximum price approved for Temple High CTE Center
Temple school trustees approved a guaranteed maximum price of $22.9 million for the next phase of Temple High School’s new Career and Technical Education building.
This total does not include site preparation work that has already been done. Including the $22.9 million for the upcoming building package, the cost of the project to date is just over $31.8 million.
Kent Boyd, assistant superintendent of finance and operations, presented the maximum price to the Temple Independent School District board, with representatives of American Constructors and Stantec Architecture & Interior Design present to answer questions.
In a follow-up email, Boyd said that construction on the new building should begin soon. It is planned to be available for classes at the beginning of the 2018-19 school year.
At the meeting, Boyd explained the process of how TISD worked with American Constructors, the construction manager, and architects to develop the GMP package.
“This is a process that we go through with every construction project we do,” he said. “We begin by soliciting input from the staff on those campuses. In many cases we’ve taken tours — in this case we took tours to numerous school districts in different parts of the state to look at CTE facilities. We took staff members from our high school, they went with us.”
The staff members were then able to meet with the construction team to discuss what they needed from a new CTE building.
“Typically, at that point Stantec has come back and met with (Superintendent) Dr. (Robin) Battershell, (director of maintenance) Ken Wolf, and me, and we’ve sat down and really worked to hone in and fine tune what we would like to see,” Boyd said.
Boyd said that once they have an idea of what the project should look like, the planning team seeks out pricing from suppliers and subcontractors and then begins cutting back to fit the project into the budget.
“We always meet at least once, in this case we met three times, to work on (budget cutting),” Boyd said. “Finally after that … we come to you with a recommendation for a proposed GMP, guaranteed maximum price, that we believe, again, addresses everything that we need, does not shortchange instruction most of all, and also does not shortchange the integrity or the uniqueness of the design of the building.”
Trustee Ronnie Gaines said the numbers seemed “pretty straightforward.”
Board President Steve Wright asked a few questions about the bidding process for subcontractors but said that it would be difficult to second-guess all the bids and line items in one meeting.
“It’s kind of like drinking from a fire hose to sit down and read this,” Wright said. “What you really want to say is ‘What is it that you don’t know that we need to be asking?’ … We’re trusting the system on this.”
Project manager Craig Eilers said American Constructors would be available to answer further questions if the board has concerns later on.
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