In the next two weeks, residents will see the first signs of construction at the site where the new elementary school will stand about 18 months from now. Starting April 16, gates, fencing, and other site security measures will be installed, and trees and brush will be removed from the site. Later in April, workers will begin removing layers of soil that were determined by geotechnical testing to be unsuitable to support the new building.
This work is all part of the “early package,” which includes structural and foundation work that can be done while bid documents for the rest of the project are prepared. The elementary school’s early package accounts for about 30 percent of the total construction budget. Bid documents on the remainder of the work are scheduled to go out April 26 and bids are due back by the end of May.
As design finishes and construction begins, the main function of the School Building Committee (SBC) will shift to discussion and approval of change orders. To facilitate that process, Chair SusanMary Redinger told the committee that she had chosen a change order working group to attend weekly construction meetings and meet in executive session to discuss change requests and participate in cost negotiations. The group’s recommendations for change orders will be bundled into monthly packages that the full committee will meet to discuss and vote on. Members of the working group are Ron Ostberg, Carl Sciple, Angus Fraser, and Redinger.
Tom Murphy of NV5 told the committee there is a 5 percent contingency in the construction budget that will be used to fund change orders. To give the committee an idea of the cost of change orders in a typical Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) project, Murphy presented a 2013 MSBA report that looked at change orders for 27 projects across the state. The average amount of the construction budget needed for change orders in those projects was just over 3 percent, with a low of just less than 1 percent and a high of almost 7 percent.
He also explained that change requests are typically generated for four reasons: design issues missed in the drawings, unforeseen conditions, owner-directed changes in scope, and third-party requests, such as those from a fire department. Of those four reasons, the MSBA report cited owner-directed changes in scope as the costliest category of change orders, accounting for an average of 1.21 percent of the construction budget. The second highest category was design issues, followed by unforeseen conditions and third-party requests.
In addition to standard change requests, some may need more immediate approval than the monthly SBC meeting would provide. Murphy said the committee needs to vote on a dollar limit it will authorize the working group to use to allow it to approve time-critical requests. The construction manager, Shawmut, also has a separate contingency that can be used with approval of the project manager and the working group to authorize requests such as paying a contractor overtime to keep the project moving.
As for keeping track of how the budget is holding up as change orders are approved, Murphy said NV5 will continuously track the budget and both contingencies, and will provide the SBC with monthly updates on those numbers as well as progress reports on the project.
