Since November, Harvard’s selectmen have been bombarded with ideas for how to renovate Town Hall using what’s left of the $3.7 million budget set by Town Meeting. This week they seemed to have finally settled on an approach that all five members of the board could endorse.
Sometime in the next two weeks, Chairwoman Marie Sobalvarro and Leo Blair will meet face-to-face with the architect, LLB of Providence, R.I., and ask for two fresh schematic designs for the historic town center building. The first request will be for LLB to modify its existing design so it can be built with the $2.2 million estimated to be available for construction. That design features a new addition, second-floor community meeting space, an elevator, and expanded heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC).
Sticking with existing footprint
The second request will be for a design that reuses the existing 1870s-era building, including its current addition, and “as many existing systems and building components as possible,” according to a draft outline circulated by Sobalvarro to her colleagues earlier this week. This second design would also have to fit with available funds.
The selectmen will ask for the design to be completed within the next six weeks, in time for them to present their recommendations to voters at Town Meeting on April 1.
This latest plot point in the on-going drama of Town Hall and its renovation follows a string of events that played out in the waning months of 2013. First, voters twice rejected a request by the selectmen and their building committee for an additional $1.1 million to build the existing plan devised by LLB in 2012. That request became necessary by a surge in the projected cost of the project when it was put out to bid.
A clear voter mandate
With a clear voter mandate to do the work within the existing budget, the selectmen held two public hearings in December where citizens were invited to offer their ideas for renovating the building at a lower cost. The results of those meeting are summarized on the town website. These forums were followed by a behind-the-scenes debate among the selectmen, leading to an approach that Chairwoman Sobalvarro sought to capture in a draft memo she circulated among her colleagues last week.
In her memo, Sobalvarro said she wanted any plans developed by LLB to be specific enough to estimate their cost. She wrote that LLB should be asked to provide options for HVAC, plumbing, fire protection, and other building components from which the board could choose. “Our interest is to reuse as many existing systems and building components as possible,” she wrote. It would also be important, she said, for the architects to “collaborate” with the building inspector, fire department, and other “inspectional services.”
Notably absent from Sobalvarro’s outline is any talk of demolishing the existing addition or of a “phased” renovation, as several residents advocated in the public forums.
Before going further, at least one legal question must be answered. Is LLB obligated by its contract to offer a scaled-back version of its original design at no additional cost to the town? On Tuesday, Selectman Leo Blair and Sobalvarro said they thought the answer was “yes.” But others wondered if asking for a 25 percent reduction in scope was more than standard contract language allowed. The question awaits an opinion from Town Counsel Mark Lanza.
Is a revision of current design feasible?
But even if the contract obligates LLB to revise its current design, a second question remains: Is it even possible? Tim Bragan told the board Tuesday that he recalled having asked LLB that question last October, and that the answer had been “no.” In an email to the Press this week, Town Hall Building Committee Chairman Pete Jackson told the Press that LLB had told his committee that “the only way to bring the cost back into budget would be to reduce the size of the building. In order to reduce the size, we would have to reduce the scope, or program need.”
“During the summer we went through several cost reductions to keep the project cost estimate on budget,” Jackson wrote. “By the end of July, we felt that we had done all that could be done to reduce cost to the budgeted amount. Unfortunately, as you know, the bids came in above the July cost estimate.”
“Public comments that would lead us to believe that we could ‘sharpen the pencil’ and bring the cost down to the budget do not realize that we had made significant reductions without reducing the program needs,” he added.
