posted by Joe Polk at 5:48 PM /
The Mt. Lebanon school board wants one more expert to weigh in on its high school renovation project before it goes out to bid, pushing the project back by a week.
The board was scheduled to vote next week on the final bid specifications for the high school project, which would outline each contractor's duties and the school district's expectations, said board President Josephine Posti. The documents already have been reviewed by the board, district staff, its solicitors and the contractors who prepared them, but the board decided it wanted to hire an outside expert to conduct one final check of the bid package before it votes, she said.
Read the full article:
The board was scheduled to vote next week on the final bid specifications for the high school project, which would outline each contractor's duties and the school district's expectations, said board President Josephine Posti. The documents already have been reviewed by the board, district staff, its solicitors and the contractors who prepared them, but the board decided it wanted to hire an outside expert to conduct one final check of the bid package before it votes, she said.
Read the full article:
- www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_723207.html (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
Labels: high school renovation, school board, school district
12 Comments:
Once again, the print media fails to ask the obvious question "WHY?"
Bill Lewis
What is the interest cost to the taxpayer of a one week delay? The salary of hiring another full-time teacher in the school district?
More waste of our hard-earned tax dollars!
Mt Lebanon residents should be livid and demanding school board member resignations at public meetings! Our elected officials should be ashamed!
Our tax dollars are collected to provide our children with an education and not to continuously fuel frivolous mistakes from wealthy elected officials!
John (Kendrick), you're only thinking it through halfway.
Waste = Cost - Benefit.
You've got the cost accounted for, but how about the benefit? Doesn't that delay purchase something?
It purchases a review of the project documents that are about to be put to bid. If those documents contain errors (and there's reason to believe they do), catching them now means those errors won't come back to us as change orders and construction delays.
So: What's the expected benefit of eliminating a review's worth of change orders and construction delays? (And, if the expected benefit exceeds the expected cost, how is the school board's decision to have one more review wasteful?)
Cheers,
Tom
I can answer that, Tom.
The due diligence should have been done by the district solictor on retainer. David Huston
David, how effective is the district solicitor likely to be at spotting errors that could cause change orders or construction delays? And, if someone else is likely to be more effective, at what point is it beneficial to ask that person to review the plans?
Cheers,
Tom
Tom,
My point, and I think that David Huston will agree, is that any unanswered questions should have been resolved quite earlier in this adventurous journey.
Education proponents should be outraged that we could have hired a teacher with the interest that we will pay for this one week delay.
Folks, we are burning cash as if it was garbage! Has the whole world gone mad?
Early on Dan Remely promised that the district would hire a full-time construction manager to oversee this, stating that the money would save us far more than the salary of such a person. Maybe this is who should review the plans for errors, etc. Oh, but we never hired any such person, instead relying on the architect and others to whom we have been paying exorbitant fees. I guess that prior reviews by the "board, district staff, its solicitors and the contractors", being insufficient tells us how much faith the board has in this plan.
Even with further review by an "outside expert", the over/under on change orders is probably in the high double digits.
Joe Wertheim
John (K),
If you want to argue that this review is evidence that the school board is screwing up, you’ll have to show that we would be better off without the review. So far, you haven’t.
If you want to argue that this review is evidence that the school board has already screwed up, you’ll have to show that we would be better off had we done something differently in the past that would now make the review unnecessary. So far, you haven’t.
It seems self evident that it’s hard to review bid documents before they’re created and irrelevant to review them after they’ve been sent to bid. It follows from this that the best time to consider a review is just before the bidding. In other words, now.
And, given that we must decide whether to review the documents now, the past is irrelevant to our decision: to the extent it matters, it is already accounted for in the here and now. Therefore, the question to be asked is this: Right here, right now, would we be better off with a review? And, if the answer is Yes, we should do the review.
What else is there to it?
Cheers,
Tom
Tom,
What else?
It sounds like you are pleased with the performance of our Board with this project? Am I reading you correctly?
Isn't Dan Remely a successful commercial realtor? Are you pleased with his input and oversight of this project?
John (K),
I’m not defending the school board: I’m attacking arguments that don’t make sense. Like yours earlier, in which you argued that the school board’s decision to have a pre-bid review was a “waste of our hard-earned tax dollars,” despite evidence to the contrary. Like yours just now, in which you inferred that I must be pleased with the school board’s handling of the entire high-school project, just because I think the school board made a good decision about one small portion of that project (the pre-bid review).
Just so we’re clear on this, I think the high-school project is wasteful and academically ineffective, and I have said so consistently and repeatedly.
That does not mean, however, that I’m going to start jumping to conclusions that evil lurks behind everything the school board does. I’m perfectly willing to believe that good people can make bad decisions. And, when they do make bad decisions, I don’t hesitate to say so.
But, when they make good decisions, I’m also going to say so, especially when other people are beating them up. That’s because penalizing representatives when they make good decisions is crazy. It provides exactly the wrong incentives.
So don’t bring the heat unless you can back it with evidence. Without evidence, you’re just stating your opinion.
Cheers,
Tom
P.S. You still haven’t supported your claim that the pre-bid review is a waste of tax dollars. Can you? (Or is that just your opinion?)
Tom,
The high school project began over 10 years ago. Let me put this in another context - we have spent over 10 years trying to synthesize a design. We have watched children transition from kindergarden to college and we still, despite borrowing $75,000,000.00, don't know exactly what is going to be built or how much it is going to cost. It is my opinion that the final cost will be somewhere between $95,000,000.00 and $140,000,000.00 - and most likely around $120,000,000.00
What stuns me is that you don't think that anywhere in that project time-line over the last 10-12 years that there should have been a final design review and a lock-down on the requirements with an approval to move forward before this most recent review.
I'll tell you what, Tom - you present an acceptable argument to me why you feel that this current delay is not wasteful, and then I will let you know why I feel that it is wasteful... because until I hear an acceptable case presented to me for my judgement of your position, all that I am hearing is your opinion, and nothing more.
In the meantime, if you chose to continue to opine as a mouthpiece for mismanagement and wasteful spending of our hard-earned tax dollars please continue to do so...
PS: You still have not answered my question about Dan Remeley.
John (K),
I’ve already stated why the current delay is not likely to be wasteful. In case you didn’t catch it, here’s the gist: A pre-bid review’s expected benefits (catching mistakes that would otherwise become change orders or construction delays) outweigh its expected costs (one week’s delay and $3.5 thousand); therefore, we ought to do it. As to why it makes sense to do a review just before the bid, I’ve already explained that, too.
Cheers,
Tom
P.S. I’m not going to bother responding to the rest of your comment, including your personal attacks (“mouthpiece”) and your Remely question, because it’s irrelevant to determining whether a pre-bid review makes sense.
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