001here miss ham mr harrigan here mr martelly yeah mr jean here mrs rosenberg yeah mr white not here you do have a quorum of the planning committee all right thank you let's stand for the pledges please to reply from the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay i don't see any members of the public here public speaking do we have any emails uh dr song we do not regarding that thank you all right with that um i am number three ben you want to get right into the capital body with you i do thank you and good evening everyone i did provide copies of three documents that i want to talk about with regard to the 22 23
002through 26 27 couple budget this is an initial discussion of the capital budget which does need to get planned committee on board approval ultimately we're not looking for approval tonight but i thought it would be helpful to present what the capital budget is starting to look like for the next five years and so i did want to start with this the first sheet which has the um information then right on the right hand side i also have it here on the small board but i know it's a little bit far for everybody to see it's kind of small so what we're looking at here is what the board approved as the capital plant types in one corner what the five-year capital plan that was approved by the board of ed in february of 2021 and
003then over on the far side these are the reductions that were made and these reductions were specifically because the school modernization plan was was in discussion and going forward and so the plan as was being discussed for the two new elementary schools meant that we could take out any of the capital budget requests for chapman for darcy for norton and for hummingston and central office so i'm going to just scroll to the bottom because we don't need to go through all the detail i think the the major point is this that to do what we needed to do over the next five years to keep our buildings i will say in good maintenance repair making sure we're taking care of roofs masonry cafeterias paving sidewalks windows that need to be replaced that request was 37.7
004million for the entire district however when you pull out the costs related to chapman darcy morton and hummus then that totaled 9 million dollars 9.3 million so the revised capital budget that the town council ultimately approved for five years is 28.3 million dollars okay so just keep in mind we pulled out from last year's approved capital budget every request for those four schools just do you understand is that sam's new here okay just speak up if we need to pause everybody i think you know that so the next sheet which is uh the smaller sheet with the two pie charts what i've done here is really summarize the capital budget request for the next five years and so if we start on the left side you can see that the total is 26 million 497
005hundred and so i've left out of this request any requests for those four schools that will come offline under school modernization okay so the starting point for the new five-year capital plan is last year less what was approved which is about two million dollars worth of improvements that we'll be doing over the course of this year in the summer so that's the starting point for the new five-year plan and so to go through it quickly of the 26.49 million 7.7 million is for window replacements for the remaining schools 5.1 million is for roofing primarily but also paving sidewalk masonry improvements that's about 19 we need another 5 million dollars for cafeteria improvements of that the big number is 4.2 million for cheshire high school hvac improvements across the district 2.9 million about 11 and then
006the rest is you could read it for yourself i don't need to go through all the details so the the thing about the request for the five year capital plan is it's no frills it's just the things that we need to keep the schools in good repair you know certainly starting with roots and hvhc improvements are necessary in our schools at this point and then the next set of columns over is just of the 26.49 million how much are we requesting to be allocated for the first fiscal year on the plan um and the town council although they approve a five-year plan they only approve funding for the first year of the plan okay so the request you could see is 5.44 million and of that the top line or the largest percentage of the
007request is for window replacements and we'll go through a little bit of the detail in a minute so this is just overall for the district the next largest percentage is for cafeteria improvements that's 845 000. we want to redo the cafeteria and highland and also we need some refrigeration equipment at the high school then after that is hvac improvements 645 and then we need to make some exterior uh building improvements which is about so i'm just going to go through one more question do you have do you not [ __ ] your head how much of this in the five year total middle school uh i could break it out by school but when we go to the next sheet you can actually see it and we could kind of work through the total together before you
008go yeah just i'm just noticing the percent so next to the 20 20 22 23 caliber yeah is it just a typo no you know what it is i didn't it's okay i didn't have a plus stuff for these two no 650 of the 300. i didn't see anything though i know i just noticed that as we were talking about i was like no or missed that so it's based on you know primarily discussion with the facilities director rich corvette you know we go through the list we look at what are the things that have to be done now and what can we push out and roughly you know the 26 million if you look at it which i'll show you in a minute we're roughly allocating somewhere in the neighborhood of five million dollars
009per year over the five years we can move as part of the process we can move items out more items in but that 5.4 million as i'll kind of show you those are things that we really can't wait on you know for very much longer so you couldn't take an item for next year and push it out to your five you know sometimes we can push it out to year two and that's what you know we're responsible collectively to do look at what's the request how big is the request are we comfortable with the size of the request and then do we want to move items around instead we'll go in with five million but usually on average over the past couple years i mean i mean if you look over the last 10 years
010of the first year request they've approved somewhere around 60 of the request you know but it's to be clear it's not that they say no to it it's typically a delay is what it is they just push a little bit more and say yeah what would be the delay or is there a contractual delay now it wouldn't be a contractual delay you know the issue with delaying is if you're going to do something this year and you push it off the year you're going to have escalation you know whatever we use four to five percent as construction escalation um so it's it's a judgment call you know we you know i don't want to stand here and say anything is in at risk of catastrophic failure but if you look at the zoo little roof
011which you know we have been pushing out for a couple years that's a three million dollar roof system we've got to get to it you know we're starting to get nervous about it it's not leaking but it is way past its intended life and it's a hypalon roof so you can't replace it with a like material it's even difficult to patch if it does start to leak um the uh i guess part of the reduction was the i guess the freezer i'll call it the freezer extension project at northern school um what was so what's the patchwork solution for that for i guess the remaining years so the one of the advantages of um renovating the cafeterias is to increase the amount of students we could get through the serving line we did that at
012too little you know we essentially doubled the number we went from one to two serving lines so we're able to get the students through the line quicker so less time is spent waiting in line and getting their food more time is spent you know eating the food and socializing with their classmates so that would be the effect if we don't do the norton cafeteria at this point yes we do replace equipment to the extent we can we re-work the kitchen to make it more functional and we improve the flow with the serving line which was the intended improvement at north so the storage is is is okay well i think that wasn't there a problem there with the condenser or something like that we'll get by with the storage because we've been getting by with
013that you know for several well for more than several years because that's really the original cafeteria space right when the school was built even though we added an extension we never increased the size of the calf or the serving area so knowing that potentially we have a school being built in three years we can get by and if we need to replace some equipment well that's kind of we're very important that we're still functional operational working on and i guess the other thing to point out in the event we don't get approval for you know the plan as proposed the school monetization plan you have to remember that that nine million dollars is still pending out there we will have to get to it so that's another way to look at the nine million dollars
014okay thank you so long on the first page take out cheshire high school replace heating oil well because we had we have planned to pull out the tank and there was really a question mark whether we needed to replace the tank so cheshire high school right now we pulled out the tanks this summer as planned and during the council deliberations it was decided we don't need to fund the replacement we would only do the replacement if there's a sense that you want to have a backup to the natural gas which we've never you know certainly over the last decade had an issue with natural gas supply but there is you know an argument argument that could be made that because that is the emergency shelter for the town we should replace that tank so we
015didn't go that direction in the capital plan and that's why that one came out in particular was through those deliberations we can always go back in and add a tank if that's the decision that's made thank you okay we're good i'm just gonna walk you through so this 26 million 497 this is the detail this is the last sheet that i handed out it's got the yellow and green this is the detail that makes it up so i wanted to start at the bottom first which is the first year of the capital request is a 5.445 million that's in the uh hand out the letter size hand that i just gave out i also wanted to point out that this 2 million 25 000 is what was approved and funded for the current fiscal year
016so that's what we've got to prove and then if you look along the bottom you can see that it's 5.4 million as a request for your one 5.9 million 5.2 4.2 and then 5.6 million dollars so it's kind of spaced out pretty evenly i would say um so if you want to just think about it globally you know what we need to invest in the remaining schools per year over the next five years assuming everyone agrees with the proposal is about five million dollars per year that's the capital investment that we have to make and then if we if we look at it this particular worksheet is sorted by building and then we have a description of what the request is so the i'm going to highlight um some of the big ones so here
017at cheshire high school this is the kitchen upgrade it's 4.2 million we actually had a study done by fletcher thompson back in 2014 to determine what the you know what the cost of the improvements would be this would be a pretty substantial renovation it would increase the size of the cafeteria so we wouldn't have to cross into the commons for lunch right so there's a traffic flow issue you have food going back and forth against the main corridor we would look to solve that by pushing the cafeteria out towards route 10 so you make that a bigger space you would also improve the functionality of the flow for students as they're purchasing lunch and paying for lunch and you would also expand and make a more modern presentation of the different types of food so
018you know right now we kind of have these pockets if you've been in the high school recently you know your sandwich area is kind of hidden in one corridor the salads are separate nothing is really displayed attractively we have limitations on what we could do so this would modernize it the way you would see in a newer school building um kind of moving along here the hvac improvements for the high school you know we're we're doing this in small increments just to try and spread the costs out over the years but we would need about a million dollars just to start phasing in air conditioning if we go a little further window replacements at cheshire high school we've been roughly contributing about 250 000 a year for windows we really need to up that pace
019even the windows that were replaced about a little over 20 years ago those are starting to fail so you know by increasing the investment to 500 000 per year we have a chance at catching up and getting all the windows replaced we still do have single pane original window sets at cheshire high school we do have to replace that there is an energy efficiency improvement by replacing the windows not to mention they're more attractive the more comfortable for the students inside the classroom then there's a group of district-wide projects they tend to be relatively small so you question andrew about dodd we've got 250 for stage renovation 650 for the fire alarm control system which we want to replace in year one of this capital budget what we have is functional but it's an older
020system it's not addressable it doesn't it doesn't give us all the modern day features that a fire alarm system should have in the school so we want to do that this year if we can another 420 for different types of hvac so we have 420 500 000 another 150 000 a million dollars for the roof replacement at dodd you could see we didn't get 475 000 approved for this year but we needed another million dollars um and i think this is bare bones you know dodge roof system there's several on the building they're all past the 20-year life intended life cycle they are out of warranty we've been stripping and seaming the dot roof for several years now just to keep it as leak free as possible but you know the roof will fail so
021we're going to have to start replacing it in chunks 475 was approved we did ask for 900 000 so we'll do as much as we can with 475 this year and dodge windows again for the most part original windows single pane we need two and a half million dollars for that you could see we pushed that out into year four and five with the plan so i mean i'll tell dodd's you know that's four million something like that just ballparking it um 650 for um fire alarm control system um if it's antiquated why are we pushing it out to 2024 and why aren't we doing it now well that's too little we're okay yeah we're prioritizing it right you're still on that no well that's we're asking for this year yeah and we push doolittles
022out again we're trying to balance how much funding we need per year and and managing the priority again the system works you know that's it's not failing but it's also not an addressable modern system questioned yeah so if you need 600 000 to do all of the roofing at god middle school what was what's behind the decision to only allocate 475 trying to manage into a number that was going to be funded but that means we can't do the whole roof right so like a lot of things in our plan you'll see that we tend to look at it from a worse first basis that's the way we do the labs that's the way we do the sidewalk replacements what's the worst we get those done first so there's a balance to strike here again
023i don't this is not anything on this list that we think is in catastrophic failure mode or as a safety concern but it's also not going to last for much longer if it's on the five-year capital plan so it needs to be addressed it needs to be funded can i ask ben i know is very very discussion with this but moving forward could we could you do these pie charts for the first year and the five-year purse by school just so we can see where the money is i can do anything you ask for within reason no i mean i just think that it would be good to see because yeah today so at the next you know presentation um with the planning committee i'll certainly have that okay and you gotta well just two
024more things i just wanted to throw another couple of things out um i already mentioned do a little group so we're asking for 50 000 this year to get the roof system design and we're asking for the three million that we think we need for next year this was shifted here we tried to get the 50 000 under three million so it did get shifted um do little needs new windows as well and this was you know i already talked about the highland cap improvement we would like to do we also need to start addressing highlands windows islands i know it's our newest school but you know 52 years um we've got a lot of got a lot of use out of the windows but you know we have to start replacing those as well
025so that's kind of really the top level first cut what i wanted to say is there may be additional items we will need to add not in year one is the likelihood but in years two through five so you know we're still working through some of that so the next time we present this it might change a bit i don't expect anything gigantic but just wanted to put that out there as a caveat has there been any movement on uh getting an estimate for a total overhaul to age back to doolittle we well we requested one for dodd which we could use as as a as a benchmark for what it would cost to do little we actually did get a proposal for the the estimate and the vendor is working on the estimate now
026okay so when we get that again i think we could use that as a rough order of magnitude what does it look like to take a school that doesn't have very much in the way of air conditioning and an older hvac system to the extent it has hvc what is that going to cost that todd that's bigger than doolittle obviously um and the firm that um that we're using will also get to see the quality of work on the estimate so we can decide if we want to branch out additional schools great thank you frank um the energy decommit the highland generator have you gotten the interval demand data by chance um we do you got it i think so i'll double check tim okay just as a reminder i know you're going to pick
027up on that one and i know what you want to do at highland instead of um you know like a diesel fuel generator look at some other type of of the system yeah so the basic idea is technology is changing related to energy there might be an opportunity to instead of just buy a generator to possibly buy a generator and a battery that could actually save money also it was last week i was there's a webinar by eversource the green banking ui talking about state incentives for batteries program kicks off on january 1st it's a big deal for nine years it's coming from her up but it's going to be significant incentives to get this stuff rolled down uh because it goes beyond our schools statewide uh the benefit of having battery back up yeah
028and just so everybody understands what this tim's referring to the highland emergency generator request of 220 000 the idea there is that we have a permanent emergency generator at cheshire high school which is our it's our primary emergency shelter but we found uh and i don't even remember what storm it was we found that we needed to use two buildings one you know for some daycare purposes for some internet and wi-fi access as well as the high school so island kind of serves as a secondary backup site hence the logic for that also highland has you know we call it the government freezer but it's a freezer that's dedicated for the district to store food service items some of it comes from the united states department of agriculture every year but it's general freezer storage
029for the entire district so we don't want to lose the contents in that freezer an emergency generator would prevent us from having to roll up the towns generator you know we've had incidents in recent years where even though the town has two rolling generators and our schools including highland have hook up we found ourselves not being able to roll a generator to a site because like we've lost the one we lost the main generator at town hall so one of the emergency generators had to go there and one to get where else it had a roll to so it's just not enough yes my basic concern is that i have no problem with that moving forward as an emergency generator but in light of changes in technology and economics i think we have to have
030a real uh consideration of the alternatives before moving forward with that just to see if it makes sense yeah understood okay that's well i have to present so just a quick question on what does uh escalation how is escalation working for this i'm thinking specifically of the when you mentioned the little 3 million every few years we do adjust our numbers for escalation we didn't this year that estimate that we got to do a little you know we obtained last year so it's it's in the right ballpark and you know when we go out to bid you know depending on what what's happening in the market i think it's a solid range so we'll be plus or minus a few percentage points thank you sir all right let's move into uh the main event here
031school modernization item number four we have our team from full years here who has been diligently managing some subcontractors as well as doing some work themselves we've been doing probably the last couple weeks or so we've had a in the little hiatus weeks with elections but um we've been doing some due diligence um efforts at the house of tonal property in the north end of the camp of town where there's a potential site for one of the schools um as well as the norton parcel as well we performed what they call phase one environmental site assessment with lion engineering that's basically um a historical review of the sites um looking at the past history um of those sites really you know from agricultural is really big impact obviously we're looking for areas of concern in
032environmental type of issues on both of those so in those studies there wasn't anything really any blockbusters that we see for a budget at the cosmo property it's primarily the use of pesticides and herbicides in past it was used as a agricultural um typically those do not wash out with rain they stick to the soil they stable typically through the first 12 inches of the soil so what's important to understand those really is how we have to manage those if they exceed certain dep levels or there's a residential exposure criteria limit that's really important for basically touching it for children you know if they're touching us they exceed a certain um limit we basically have a barrier that's what we how we handle typically on sites you get disclosed off-site it's expensive and it's hard
033to find sites actually accept that material these days but the other one is the pollutant mobility criteria has more to do with groundwater pollution that's what is important but the other one usually kind of takes precedence when we're talking about schools for the most part um so that one is pretty straightforward um they did see there was a house in the corner of the parcel i think it records maybe more uh um jarvis and aryan and they suspect it could be an underground storage tank there but it's local um so i don't think anything we need to look into that right away we may want to we're going to be uh looking to lying in to procure clothes to take some soil samples and analyze them support the herbicides and pesticides we know up front
034when we get down for it get into the budgets and the site work at the norton site on that somewhat similar um most of those concerns with the existing building you know they'll say like the boil around um you know as an area of concern um there was you have a new 8 000 gallon storage tank there and there's reports of an older 8 000 soda reporter i'm not sure when that would have been because the tank that's in north now it's been there for just about 30 years and there's a fiberglass yeah maybe like 90s i think that is whatever report so they basically just identified areas that we need to be aware of um and look at it's mostly in the existing existence any aoc is in the undeveloped portion of the property
035were they all building specific um no there was one i think if i remember the back right they spotted a uh oil like 55 gallon barrel drum that's suspect you know how long it's been everyone knows i didn't see it but you know it's that one you know one part of the parcel that let us take a look at it um it may not even impact the project but when you we we actually ran into a project where they there's some actually buried 55 gallon drums we're putting the utility in the very back side we would never suspect it ran into it so we had to remediate it we took care of it phase one here was that site was basically undeveloped or farmland norton yes yeah i think uh obviously there's the wooded area
036um and i think they're saying that the part that was probably you know station that's a big concern obviously you know nothing we're surprised at um that would you know have pause um we also did some geotechnical warnings these are preliminary ones we will projects move forward the design team would be responsible for doing more in-depth more comprehensive one um basically they take horns every 50 feet on center for that but this should just give us an idea of what's in the ground at the tunnel property basically the recommendation is keep the school up on the higher side of the site closer to marion um the lower side of the site i think you know you can actually suspect as you get towards the wetlands the soils aren't as um supportive for a building there
037um i think it's some of the test bits most of the pilot maybe recommended doing fields back there which would probably be appropriate use back in that area um and certainly if some of these soils you know if we can't um if they're so good we can use those for some of the fields hopefully um and get what we call that insight we don't want to take material off and we don't want to bring it were they basically building corners or were they just kind of site-wide i mean i can look at the report i think what we did is we looked at a couple of test beds and they kind of superimpose them and try to get you know a majority of the areas where the building might be to give us you know
038a good representative sample given those options again if we go out one do is not only for the building but if there's any drainage structures we want to know that too if there's any deep utilities because that can impact um you know this excavation but i don't think any of them really hit any ledge that's like any legendary they suspected they're all west yeah we're probably going to want to avoid that ladder we got to provide that to them because they know that they didn't know of any sewers going through we want to make sure we give them that that utility map that we have uh so they can know that in the report and then norton uh no surprises there um that was pretty or special type of foundations that are a lot more
039expensive to budget so we have those reports back that's good again we're going to be um some proposals for the base to take some sampling so we can understand that up front that's really important uh it's important to give it to the design team going out with our so they know what they have to deal with and make sure they're responsible for managing that um so just so everyone here knows that their next charge is to do environmental soil sampling of the hazardous property to delineate what the actual levels of peasant size are whatever composition is out there and also to do a traffic study for the marion yep we have that proposal and i think next month um i think we're going to be requesting approval that's a more high level it's not super
040duper i think it's it's not a fully in-depth traffic study um if i understand it john compared it back a little bit give us an engineering you know you know a stainless so it's looking at you've got to move a lot of topsoil um what is it it's like up to i don't know on the property um just i'm honest uh you're moving it because it's not stable or you're moving it just out of the sense of caution understanding it could be contaminated moving it or sampling well i mean the report talks about just essentially scraping that yeah so when we go to build a structure okay behind the town apartment there's about a foot of a console that material is not suitable to put a foundation on top because it's organic material and that
041stuff that will settle over time and you can practice your building essentially so we need to make sure that the bottom of the footies are on stable soil that can that can bear the weight of the building and it's appropriate so basically we scrape that off push it to the side get down to the soil good good earth put our foundations on and build back up and we'll want to reuse those soils we'll estimate the quantities during design and use those in in the final layout of the um the proposed project when we when they do the grades the grading and playgrounds and part a lot of complex you know programs that can kind of give them the quantities we just want to make sure we're all balanced like we're not taking off we're not
042bringing them in we have to scrape those soils out of the way to get to good um what they call um load-bearing uh soil for the and so um you know we're dealing with open property uh with the catholic counter property but you're surren you've got neighborhoods surrounding is there going to be an impact on those homes by moving that tough soil either in terms of runoff or anything else that we need to be aware of and yeah no good question so in any type of development whether it's a school or any proposed development planning and zonings and commissions engineering departments in every town they'll be what they call an existing analysis versus a storm runoff now look at all where the storm runoff is typically they'll concentrate to a point they'll they'll calculate how
043much runoff given different they call design years so even more intense storms they'll go how much is coming off any development has to be net zero runoff um through that's where you see the tension basins you know on sites you know the you know developments of these big detention structures what that is meant to do is one for water quality two for the quantity to slow that water down retain it so that it doesn't go off faster than what it was naturally when we started so the answer is we have to design it so it doesn't impact neighboring parcels the soil itself that's going to all that's going to come into the grading plants and into the drainage plants we'll have to take into account the building because your roof structure is called an impervious
044surface that's going to you know obviously run off and go to your roof leaders and so forth into the storm system so any additional payment will probably be more payment in these projects than what there is now that's additional so i'm just looking at this in comparison to your report and the diagram itself but nothing's being mentioned of that and then report yeah that one what you're holding is a was the preliminary one what they actually that was before they went to the site so when they got to the site you know they adjusted down to the five so that's combining i'm just trying to figure out and now that it's adjusted what are you combining i'm not sure what they did in the final sampling america they're so this was again this was probably
045their plan previously going out and we we do what they call a one day effort because the golf we have to run another track track for the the equipment for another day they try to get six in a day if they get five it's not a requirement to get six they probably they were trying to maximize where they were taking them they just didn't get to do six in that day to bring them back for one more it's like it'd be like i think it was another twenty five hundred dollars for the rig just for the day so it's it's kind of somewhat of a economic consideration as well but from what they did though do we feel is there's enough field work done to give us an accurate indication of the site capacity yeah
046so what we're doing this is preliminary when we get in design they're gonna we're gonna do a lot more of these with the design team what this is doing is is there a budget buster here is there something is there a ledge is there organic soils that go down 15 20 feet perfect example um recently down southington we did some preliminary warnings at the daranovsky school in one part of the site there's a huge part of fill it's about 13 feet deep in one portion of the site and they're recommending ram aggregate beers versus regulars and these are like more complex type of footings that's what we want to know so we're creating that budget we want to account for that and that's the primary reason for all this due diligence is is there a
047budget buster you know in you know we might have might not be able to feel as deep as we can like you're hitting like say up here is it jarvis that goes on the high side right mary and there is america see if we're up there and there's like two feet three feet down that's gonna be a problem because it's so high we're probably gonna carve into that a little bit and if we want to do it we can't it just costs you money and drilling and potentially blasting or you know pounding the rock and hammering away at it that that's much more expensive to get rid of obviously more labor intensive and heavier equipment we can do it but what's uh i mean we've done boards where we knew the rock was there but
048when we took we took the core out of it we thought it was fractured we got a solid lunge cost us 400 to take it down to the appropriate level so we're just trying to do our due diligence um to a reasonable degree with these and then once we get a design we'll do a lot more of the architecture but there's no from the initial from what we're seeing if we have a top soil and like you know it's 20 feet they're all filled and yeah just bad soil or really organic and silky or a lot of play you don't want to go around clay because it's going to expand contract and it might be how much is going to cost the builder maybe we need to look at something else it's just a discussion
049you can when you do it you can get surprises too because you could have played that's like you know 50 feet deep 10 feet long then 50 feet deep of sand thank you that's probably going to happen unfortunately we're doing this and we've hit stuff right in between yeah and if we i think it was in stones and we did burns and um we had a lot of we we missed so many large pockets boulders we pulled out unfortunately i don't have x-ray vision into the ground otherwise be much more you know i'm sorry i was looking at the map when you i think you were talking about exactly the thing i wanted to ask you about which was legendary did you say that there was no legendary or if it was legendary let me
050let me pull the report because i just i was looking at the map noticing that these feet sort of decline into the more flat soil farmland area yeah and i just wasn't sure if that was if you discovered if that was ledge or not we just pulled up our [Music] or if it even matters away from that but yeah let me just pull that up so i'm not guessing here i think to your point adam if there's you know even if there were legs way in the back of the lot if we're not building there it's not going to affect us when you sight the building we look at us no he asked about marion yeah look at the actual it's like i always get visions of like that construction has been going on at
051the uh the edge of town on the waterberry side for all these years and it's like been blasting things forever and you know just want to make sure we don't have any problems like that for that my my other questions were about norton uh you mentioned a traffic study about the castle town property was there going to be a traffic study at the in the norton area because i know with the act if and i guess leading into that was the uh the access road going out uh that would exit out to sharon drive uh thereby bringing more bus traffic through the sharon drive area and was that going to be examined and or number one is it possible number two if it is possible uh is there is there going to be a traffic
052study down there also increased volume right let's go from four to six the initial thinking there was that the connection from the sharon drive may just be during the construction approach and process and that the traffic school traffic would still be coming off from the other direction once that new school was in place and the existing school was demo so that you'd start to be flipping the site the school the new school potentially be on the back side the field would then be towards the front side but your traffic ultimately would likely come from that same direction but that's something you know the architects would end up having to look at and determine whether or not they want to come from that back end uh not just for the construction portion of it but also
053for the you know eventual maybe the bus route may come through there right because depending on what the approach is that that could likely result in another traffic study certainly but um so not yet but not yet no that was not so i know those initial tests that seem to really hinge on having that bus traffic sort of come in from sharon and circle around and kind of come back out that same way for whatever reason instead of having it come back down to 42. at least that was their initial impression yeah that's their hands down i think that's accurate yeah so look at it look at the horns i want to pop up on b3 because only because i'm three feet for whatever reason i wonder if they're missing information all one got basically
054a 22-23 t without hitting any much at all of them so i'm not saying it can't be a crop up somewhere and you know yeah i mean basically with the point you know with their plan you know it's it's representative and again we're going to do more intense economy as soon as we um yeah with regards to the with regard to access in the back just i'm just gonna put in one plug here so uh if we do end up having a road back there or even if it's just for construction and the trees are cut down and stuff uh sidewalk access back through there um yes sorry i was not clear i'll show you yeah yeah um because i realized that uh vehicles would be a concern for the residents and stuff i don't
055know who's in charge that anyways that's the council i'm assuming that's actually making any decisions compared to what in terms of access in the back of norton if that's not is that a council or border bed decision whether or not we're allowed to access that space yeah i mean there's a right of way there it's town property okay so i think if we move forward that we would want to do that the evaluation of whether or not that is utilized would also like fall on the council on buildings okay based on a recommended they would listen to our recommendation they could sure okay okay um thank you uh a couple other points with regard to um staying on norton there's a culvert the borderline culvert running all the way around the back there so what
056happens with that just in a typical situation not necessarily what happens in northern but i mean do you put like a steel plate over it to allow the copper to stay you backfill it are you talking with that access if we're using now take the access out just a general question that whole culvert right there yeah and it runs along the north property line is that the one you're talking about there's something there is a culvert so you've got you have um north east parcel that's woods yes and that's where i think you're really talking about putting a building in at least a bigger portion of it yeah it's kind of split between the fields and that yeah okay there's a culvert that runs across the northern the eastern and the southern border of that
057yeah it's like a drainage goes all the way around yeah we probably won't i don't suspect that we'll even take some of that's not even on the property it's on the adjacent land on this property okay it's close to the border yeah it's close yeah so we can't technically go across by law and go across the property line with that unless no no no no i understand that so but it will be taken into account into the design as us mentioned it earlier when they're doing the full site development that may come to play i think ideally in this case we want to leave probably as much vegetation as possible between the neighbors and the dollars i i suspect we'll try to cite this thing more to the central part of that portion if not
058maybe shade to the left a little bit where it's already open okay um ideally we want we want at least some vegetation there i mean it's a pretty big site when you look at a map that's bigger than what it seems what's when you say cold is it like a box cover like concrete there's nothing in it like that i think it's basically drainage for the properties there but it literally i mean there's points where i think it's like a four or five foot drop i mean yeah yeah it might be not equipped but it's steep it ultimately goes out to the north west corner then there's a culvert that goes up from there [Music] our development is to that okay and we have to mitigate a little counter slope and keep it onto our
059parcel in some way shape or form we wouldn't drain everything into that if it increased the flow going through that because i'll look at the existing site go how much water is going to that and where's it coming from so the drainage drainage actually wasn't my conservative conservative safety for kids who are walking around over there and right now they're not doing it because it's woods and then all of a sudden they're within you know yeah now whatever you want to put a fence you know around the playground that's another discussion right now that's a safety discussion for the the the the project itself but you know ssic and all that but for getting access to it that's a discussion of the design piece up here so where does the with regard to the casper
060channel property the the water flow from rain what what's a likely scenario for that is it literally you're just putting in a drainage pipe to bring it down to the river there so um like right through the field or well there's a lot of different um options possible solutions okay it generally goes from west to east i believe we're looking at our yeah our topography so again what they you know depending on okay where we cite the building where our circulation for you know parking and traffic goes to um i i would again suspect that um we'll probably have um there's usually a gross particle separator that takes out a lot of your sediments from a water quality storm and then it might go into we've seen many projects where it goes into detention basis
061so it goes in some of the seasons of the ground there will be an overflow and like a really high you know really large storm you know test storm um but again whatever is going to there now we cannot increase that in post development they go pre pre-development post-development free most of them has got to be a net zero they need to reduce it very sensitive area guarantee when we go to play in the zoning early discussions that's probably going to be an early one going what are some of the measures we're going to be taking you know to do that there's a lot of best practices to mitigate that um the 10-mile river is right there let's go straight down to it yeah we can't just go run a pipe and go here again
062it'll it'll be catastrophic to that to that um of course so this could be a scenario in which i see these basically like empty ponds that have some large gravel at the bottom of them so they're definitely amazing that's just one that you see a lot on the roads um there are underground storm you know um solutions that are more expensive sometimes you might get multiple swells you might have rain gardens lot of really creative ideas you can use creative landscaping um you know but also you don't want to have these attractive nuisances for mosquitoes at the same time we've had problems with those we're like okay staining water um and that's why you put the fountain in it right to aerate let's keep the mosquitoes up what's that do you put fountains in them
063maybe i i i i don't design those but i i would face one working with other districts previously uh i think you want to try to stay away from those as much as possible especially like right near the building maybe it's back not so you know not so bad but uh there's a lot of a lot of solutions out there continually evolving thank you so much my last my last point um the top soil i think there's two points on this wrenching as being the low point load bearing so i'm just trying to envision this because what i have in my mind is this building that i have is the school gonna have a basement typically they don't know we don't build basins in most of the schools like you're like your old ones have
064boiler rooms that are like hard to get down to get into and get into boilers now they're usually the bottom floor you'll have you know double open doors and your portals are so small now i mean they're they're like four foot by four foot maybe they're so efficient for these buildings um they're they're very great the mechanics we don't typically do basements um so there was there would be a basement though in terms of this being on a hill you're going to be thinking you know yeah like the marion road would be accurate one story that the building would slow down the problem with that is is you know you put your mechanicals there you don't want to put classrooms because you want natural light yeah um but they're that you may have you know
065a partial retaining wall where there's parking along there so instead you have parking then it comes to the building so you're instead of having it in the building you're having parking instead and maybe you know i don't know what the green plants are today you might have parking lot then the building so that you get everything great has natural lighting you know good [Music] these design professionals you know you saw blue glimpse with microphyllon um they're very creative um their teams come up with great solutions um all these things we're talking about they're responsible for for proposing solutions that communicate those and i think that's my last point you mentioned that since it's a farm there's likelihood of uh pesticides in the top 12 inches of soil um then you mentioned just bringing in phil
066to cover it up yeah so what we what we do yeah we want to manage it on site what we did in some other projects is depending on what some of these levels are from the sampling um if they're under the criteria you can use them to plant grass and you use them to you know your top seeding you have to have to amend them these are probably going to be really exposed from grass obviously but they do exceed these um some of the mitigation strategies are you've seen birming on some sites um where you know we may push them to maybe one edge of the site and then we have to cut one project we have covering with 18 inches of clean just soil and then six inches of you know clean top soil
067so that we don't get access to it and we know where it's at on the map we know on the gravy plane hey this this mountain has x amount we have to we have to kind of calculate but we want to know that earlier the design team can you know properly okay um when they look at their grading plans and lay out the site and the mapping so we until we have that is there anything else for the two school sites that we should be requesting of the town council to allocate money for the upfront plan planning yeah so we're gonna be obviously we're going to be requesting a proposal from um slam because the demographer that was with slr their old demography group is pretty much left their expertise there's three or four of
068them um that doesn't sound very good mike zuma who was leading that group is the slang collaborative um architectural firm he's still doing it and we certainly we certainly recommend staying with them because of the level of expertise he brings that's what we're going to be getting a proposal for that we mentioned the base two environmental assessments um uh for those as well part of the the demographer is really fine-tuning some of the you know the proposed redistricting and fine-tuning those numbers uh they really get into where's the streets where's the bus lines there's gonna be a it's a long discussion you know for that um for it i'm trying to use anything else or traffic where's our animation i think everything we've mentioned so far i think is going to cover we typically do
069a pre-referendum application to do our due diligence um we're not we'll we're demolishing it if we do norton that's a full abate and demolish we have square footage costs for that that we're pretty comfortable you know incorporating into the budget to accommodate that um if we were renovating we would want to get them in and have a look at that then do we have a limited housing supporting material inventory and we're in school for past projects i didn't even have a limited hazardous building in jail inventory for northern school that's the project that you've done internally or you might have a hero reports for like asbestos i mean we have that we have yeah eventually required to keep that um i'm not sure if we have anything else on file i mean good luck based
070upon the errors like we just got bits you know they're we're looking we usually pledge anywhere from twenty twenty five dollars a square foot for a demo you know in that range and uh we would certainly recommend the design phase bringing in um uh you know environmental consultant you know for hazmat to come in uh use do sampling um we have to strategize on that it's another whole other discussion is you know what you simple when you assume like pcbs and so forth there's a lot of strategies for fitting and taking care of that yeah i mean over the years we've mitigated most of the asbestos you know certainly and there was tons of it more unlike all the schools that were built in the 50s and 60s yeah these areas are pretty you know
071most of the windows have been done at that though yeah the windows had those type of that you know even those exterior panels had asbestos those have been abated so i'm i'm hoping that it's not going to be anything onerous that we find there so thanks andrew so you mentioned um adders in terms of cost so chuck you know my concern sustainable construction um most i do believe that would be a matter in terms of the capital cost i personally think that over the life cycle it would have to pay back on it um did you my understanding was you were going to have a sit down a normal monthly sit down or something like that with you with you with tim slocum sean kimball maybe today or yesterday yes and rich was going to
072be there richard berry you didn't get there did anybody from the energy commission get there there was nobody okay i thought something was going to be there um okay so that's my concern but i know we you know we also talked about as we get towards the planning phase where we actually know what we're building that would be you know critical component then i don't know when there's a simple so here's my simple concern is that the discussion about that i believe that it should happen before we decide on a referendum number because if we go to referendum and there's not funding in it at that time then after the referendum well we can't do that tim because there was no funding i'm a believer that that should be a conscious decision before the vote
073is taken to send it out and if it's not in there if there's no funding available in there so be it i'm just one person sitting here yeah but i do believe that it needs to be a conscious decision on the part of everybody yeah in terms of uh phases right now the next phase would be in this group would planning committee would meet again hopefully in january to discuss you know adopting or recommending this plan in terms of the two sites at that point if let's say that the planning committee moves that forward to the full board in january we would as a board vote to a doctor not adopt that claim not the dollars the the plan um the council would then take that up in the vote you know to move that
074plan forward or not by june we would have to submit things like ed specs in our meeting yesterday what we discussed was that chuck and john their team would design a timeline for you know what do we have to do if we're trying to i mean if we're obviously trying to submit the application because that drives reimbursement by the end of june what other steps have to fall in place and i think you know these guys are working on that after the holidays we should have that time frame to better understand when did dollars get assigned when do we have to figure that out so that you know at least that can be part of the conversation because i do agree with you in the sense that we need to to look at that um
075you know environmentally and for the efficiency of the building and the cost we do need to look at it i i don't know because this isn't this is my first rodeo no what the timeline for that is but we're working on developing the timeline plan that i think should help that am i wrong guys you're spot on i mean that what you're talking about and just clarify so every project goes through it's connected to high performance building that's equivalent to lead silver so that that's a must that's a baseline minimum that's required by oscgi yes that's state law so that's a baseline minimum i think it's part of the energy code now too like i think if i understand it maybe adopted this which is like 21 more efficient um that's a minimum baseline a
076lot of the additional options i'll say because you go further obviously next zero is the hot one right now we're doing school in mansfield um that's i think one of the first ones that one actually came into the budget um but geothermal obviously is you know um a big consideration um photovoltaics and how we you know what we do there and then there's other ones as well and that's part of those the minimum baseline okay higher performance again one thing we don't do is get a nice plot from the building console same person right so that that's at the minimum um so i i appreciate that i just need to be clear about this there's a moment in time when hands go in the air for the board of ed and that's my point is
077that i want to know how that fits into the equation before we're going on it but yeah we'll be talking that timeline but to be clear we're voting on not a budget so when so what well doctors was just laying out about the planning committee recommended to the full board full board and making a recommendation to the town council that's not we're not talking about dollars and cents yet i once we this body you should say moves a project forward to the council does it ever come back to the board again to vote on like the design of the school or the money being spent or anything like that in your experience probably absolutely you know i think that discussion comes into um when you establish your building committee do you have more liaison you
078know but let's say we want to do it at zero school so when would that decision be made do we get to make that decision or is that right because that's what we're going to be giving to the design team and going this is what you have to design too rfp and that but we need to know that but what you're saying is absolutely correct we need to know before we finalize the budget right typically we'll review the budget when we do the specs just so you as a quarterback can go okay yes we've seen the budget it sounds like the town council ultimately approves it but that number's got to be into there because that's what they're going to put forth for rough run that's that's going to be really the bottom line number
079um you know pretty much at that point now when we do the referendum i think the spring result of 2022 um and um the the requirements are so you know so the requirements if if you submit in june of um 2022 june 30th deadline by statute uh the statutes allow referendum towns to vote on the funding up until um november 15th you have to have you have to establish that you're going to count councils november 8th and all the datas um and report the results to the statement later that november 15th you can do that so we we have time to tweet you know says in the summer you can you know tweet that number a little bit um so i think it's an august state we would have to establish an income council was
080like the end of august in the timeline that you have to have that number in the explanatory text and then your body counts as so i don't know exactly how energy fits into expect but i'll say this i'll say this energy relates directly to the environment and public health and as a member of the board of vets for the last two years the number one topic that we have discussed in my opinion is not education it has been public health really yeah the air handling systems all this stuff the construction of new buildings it all wraps up into the same thing which is the best outcome for our kids and that includes all this stuff that's how i see it just so you know yeah so i think i feel like there is a way
081to put this stuff into pets but these new systems you have for kind of performance building the ones we've built have not had a problem with coping the new ones in south windsor dr carter you know i think you guys went looked at yeah those systems were fully capable of taking care of fresh air turnover they can man they have all the bells and whistles by default that's at a minimum they already have those in you don't have to like build those indigo and add additional dollars in order to deal with this pandemic though these new schools have they haven't had any problems there's been no no problem so it's the older ones where unit ventilators no fresh air systems um yeah it means to be fair the only way that it's translating it's not
082really translating into different cobot rates it's translating into things like they don't put up a tent we [Music] that makes more sense preparation is it relates to ed's specs i have limited experience with that from our you know project several years ago but i don't remember in that process at any point discussing hvac i mean i remember that you know we look at the programmatic offerings within the building yeah the services offered within that building the the grade levels service the the academic needs and identifying like we did recently with darcy what program you offered wasn't square footage required for that program that i mean pretty fundamental stuff not necessarily you know picking out carpet swatches and talking about you know no you don't get you don't get that deep into yeah so like when
083we talk about specs i mean i know that the board votes to adopt ed specs because that's directly related to the educational program i just don't want tim to be misled to think that oh well you know this will come back to the board to vote on something like that when i don't know that the process outlines that the actual systems we're not going to be picking actual said that's in design but if so if you say to us in order to do a net zero school it's going to be a four million dollar addition to each building or two whatever that is be to make sure that at least yeah i think it's hopeful who had his insight into it so it's part of the discussion yeah i hear what you're saying andrew kind
084of being like right so this is the silver you know the environmental to go to the next tier up of that would be an overlay and it's like almost like you're buying the car right you want the premium package that's going to cost you two thousand dollars you know or obviously that's not gonna throw money towards that community in the states there might be certain aspects of it that are not part of the reimbursement and look that theirs is building systems incorporated the new they'll be designed in accordance with the performance buildings equivalent to performance delete silver right so that's just a very generic performance requirement for it um they do get into heating hvac and cooling um i think some of this is you know um a little too but heat and cooling should
085be produced with natural gas with a boiler for heating and rooftop well that one you know that might be safe some sites have natural gas so we have it there i think we probably look at it and said we can um there we receive air conditioning uh not only those with summertime use a lot of the systems running around others will have dehumidification on your summer month to me that's a little bit too much to be honest but yeah it's a little bit more detail i i think you know just it's you know it should be more generic it's going to have updated hvac systems that meet connect to high performance buildings um that have you know filtration and these are a little a little bit uh um more detailed so is it possible do
086you think um to i don't know i'm just throwing it out there for january 20th is it possible to have based on that specs and the plans not the aspects but based on the plans that we have right now this was our dollar amount that we threw up for this plan at that silver rating yeah here's what you can envision based on the square footage to go to whatever level tim is talking about yeah that might be tough in all honesty because like i said we just did mansell elementary school and there's not a lot of net zero schools out there to take a sampling uh from that's part of the challenge we um we have one of our other colleagues worked on that project and we can pull him in and go hey what
087do we see um and um the numbers we've incorporated already that you've seen already are kind of high performance built right you know usually what we do is really the biggest thing is it's a budgetary thing so you enter budget and you look at all the line items we have lineups for k geothermal do you want to add in you know a line up for geotherm foldable tags we can put specific line items that we identified specifically values for those if the town collectively wants you know to do that it's more of a budgetary than it is more than anything else yeah can you just ask what percentage from going from the what's allowable by the state what portion of that is not reimbursable as part of the school of construction because the time needs
088to know it's a five million dollar addition to the project that five million dollars is five million dollars a hundred percent from your question correctly the state's not going to go okay because you want to go in that zero we're not going to pay for that they they have a cap right now standard is 365 dollars a square foot for the building itself not the site the building so five feet basically outside the building all ins they're using 365. now today's market is that we could number hard to say because we're all seeing what's going on with the material prices so that but we've been we've been using that number uh for that so that's a very dynamic um situation but if you say we're gonna do that zero we can do it within the
089budget it's all good it's gonna be reimbursable if they put you on a priority list it's reversible if you're in that number the bigger center we are it's the spaceman you know we're going above the space standard but they don't look at some point we're looking at the different gradations of of being energy efficient sure but i don't remember where that came in so this is yeah this one i brought up this is when we were looking at the middle school project this was a tsk page so what they did is they put together a budget and you could see as the net estimated cost was 71.1 million and then what they presented is okay here's the incremental cost on top of the budget if you want to do geothermal is 1.8 million 11.6 years
090is the payback photovoltaic 276 thousand twenty five years so you know you could take this kind of approach which i'm sure we would adding that zero or whatever other factors or types of energy efficient um measures we wanna take and and add that and i think your point is we're staying reimburses 365 a foot times the size of the building if you fit that into the project then there's really no net additional cost to do any of those any energy efficiency um my question has nothing to do with energy as far as i'm concerned this is a luxury item unless we can justify a payback to it i don't think it's realistic um that being said um all i want to know from this initial conversation is is this land buildable and can it sustain
091two schools each of the two individuals yeah the two individual parcels yeah from what we're seeing in our on our initial studies yes okay there's all the other shows these are real pieces of land that can hold real buildings that we are looking at it says geothermal payback 11.6 years what is that that we're looking at right there tskp put this together they were the design firm that did the proposal for the middle school oh the four years ago yeah yeah okay all right yeah i mean uh my gut is that most people would support you know 10 or 12 year payback on something i don't know that everybody worked but that's probably that probably has changed over time and sure fuel rates change and stuff yeah it's it's uh it's not an exact science
092i think those and you might get different opinions from different firms too sure all right so moving on so we have the preschool program after that who's trying to well i have i'll leave it off and then you know maybe um colliers and and jeff could kind of wrap it up so there's a schematic of highland school and so i just have it up on the on the board here so what i did want to kind of explain what the exercise that we took was what can we fit at highland school after we districted if you look back at the school monetization committee's recommendation after you built a new chapman and a new north and you redistrict thailand would have to fit 780 total students that includes k-6 plus the 105 students coming from pre-k
093darcy okay so the total number 780 but we need room for 675 k through 6 students so the exercise that we did is we took the existing footprint of highland and then working together as a team including scott jeffrey the principal at highland we laid out all the rooms to fit 675 students and so there's some color coding so kindergarten you have four four kindergarten classes one two three four that's the orange color first grade there's five classrooms needed again based on the enrollment projections at their peak which was actually in the last year of the enrollment study and so on through the grade so what highland has in this schematic is 37 general education classrooms okay cakes are six plus they have seven special education classrooms now the big difference is a general ed
094classroom is gonna have about 18 students per class special ed classrooms are about eight okay so you need more room for those students just because of the specific needs that they have so after completing that exercise what we backed into is what's remaining at highland school after you fill it up with tasty way and the answer is four rooms which we picked these four because this is currently the kindergarten wing but you see that there's two classrooms in the kindergarten way that are needed for kindergarten so this is roughly generously 5 000 square feet if you then look at the second document which we provided which is the expects that we work together to build with the consultant and hanson and i'm going to ask you to just go to the last two pages and
095i can bring it up here actually so this is the space summary based on looking at what is it we need to accommodate 105 um pre-k students plus the birth to three program and you can see that in alberta iii the child resource center is about 1100 square feet birth to three offices small 300 square feet for the pre-k program you need four classrooms at 1100 square feet and so on and so the total space now this could be tweaked but initial cut says we need about 15 200 square feet to properly accommodate first degree and the pre-k programs that we currently have at target and so right now you cannot fit 15 000 square feet in the existing island because you've only got about 5000 right so then the question becomes what are the
096options and i'll kind of you know open it up to chuck and john and jeff because i know we've had some additional discussion at the steering committee as well yesterday well i mean basically when you look at this here relative to the space available at highland you know the program for darcy is 10 000 square feet in excess of what's available so your options are you know to build on 10 000 square feet at home structurally we can't build up so that means we'll build enough if you've been to highlands you know at any point but certainly recently we have people parking on the grass that highlands right now we have substantial traffic problems that happened already even when you siphon off a significant number of kids as part of redistricting we're adding on net
097vehicles because of the nature of the program that's run at darcy school there will be more vehicles added than what we remove when we remove certain costs and bus the busing will increase the neighbors are already not huge fans um i just you know as we talked yesterday the sensation was that you could shoehorn potentially the some of the projects into the building and build on additional space to accommodate the other but the logistical cost regardless of what the financial cost was would be overwhelming you would just be creating many more problems than you saw alternatively we could incorporate the programming into a new construction on the north end of town but i think the thinking was that it's important for us to identify in rough numbers what the cost would be to add it
098add the program onto highlight because it's important to know that but also you know what would the cost be to incorporate the program to the northland school in that case it does allow us to close nursing school which is in need of significant repair and just cost avoidance there will be significant i mean i just from touring to rc school and listening to the both the teachers and the principal there the first three programs the stephen august really mentions that our two like flagship programs of district offers i just think that we would be going through all this into schumann was programmed to buy high school i think would be the other taxes on our card so you have to have trained pills what's the approximate square feet of the proposed new chapter i'll bring
099it up so what would that mean in terms of her percentage increase to the size of the existing proposal part of that question we're here part of that um part of that consideration though is that if if we realized that we could squeeze some additional space out around to the tumor classroom would that therefore adjust our redistricting so that not as many students would go to that non-attending school in that event would that mean less square footage on that building probably to a certain extent i wouldn't say 5 000 but some and so part of what we're doing right now is soliciting slr for all the materials the raw materials that they develop the data from their enrollment projections and then we will solicit slam the uh the firm that is now doing that sort
100of work because that's a large dependent on that business to determine how much can we do that but trump you have the square footage on them yes so at a minimum um utilizing the reimbursement or the um space standard calculation you know that we've talked about multiple times and and i think you you you guys have heard it many many times that's taking the enrollment times a certain you know square foot per student um minimum we're looking about 88 000 square feet 80 90 000 square feet up to potentially and um you know just shy of 100 000 square feet for not including creek not including the pre-k program and that all the that is all driven up those variables taken about what are we doing for the ad specs because of the space hungry
101programs um that is just really again i want to just stress because if we're videotaping some people watching the space center is a reimbursement calculation it's a reimbursement calculation but it's an indicator of what what size should this be so anywhere from basically 90 to 100 000 are varied around numbers is probably what you're looking at right now that's awesome yeah so you're adding potentially 15 yep um um all right so the uh is there a is the reimbursement rate different for um these uh pre-k um or special education programs just that i know that the state was interested in yeah it's a good question we talked about that promoting is there a reason why it's the north the north school the new chapman school is a preferred site versus the norton school site yeah
102because of the just the block property the size so if we you know we are fitting the norton school the revised norton into the back end of the morning to add another 15 000 square feet to that building if you remember some of the drawings that were proposed there's really not space to do another 15 000 square feet there certainly we have much more property enough to you know propose a middle school out there six through eight so we have enough to accommodate the additional 15 000 i did you said 15 000 square feet is the pre-k and birth to three it's every program that's currently how is the person for those that do those make up things well we have birth to three we have special ed pre-k we have smart start we have
103uh well smart stuff pre-k that was my understanding smart start is pre-k it's a different program so here's here's my question is there i presume there's a benefit is there a need to keep pre-k and birth to three together yeah that's a great question and so the answer to that was yes because every time that i've spoken to the darcy staff and i will admit to that being an early education specialist when i talk to all those who are they say the real you know value in darcy is the synergy that's gleaned from having those specialists and seeing that continuation of support some of these students have the most significant needs in our school system and so to have that continuation of support from birth to three through pre-k into the uh school is really
104invaluable and that's supports benefit because i mean the teacher could literally be in mourning at jarvis marion and then the morning or an afternoon in highland they could do that but you're saying that that's not something that would work really significantly they could do it but it wouldn't work i don't even know how you understand yes i do okay yeah marlene was just saying the same thing down here that when you're there are different resources in the classroom for that sort of program so to do half day year half day there you're doubling the need for those resources so i mean it's a fair question i mean that also came up yesterday okay um and that's that was my response then too okay sam and if you brought it up but um i'm just thinking
105about the president's uh pre-pay for all the initiative i know it may not impact us as much so if it's highly focused on low income and moderate income but or do we have somewhat of a projection that once that initiative goes into practice and where we stand with enrollment side you know sure i'm not sure that that suggestion the recommendation for that because it's not law it's not you know this is just a recommendation or a proposal my understanding was within that proposal that pre-k access not only meant publicly private access too so you know well because i think it'd be unlikely that every school system in america or even schools and hiring in the area could find the square footage or build new buildings to accommodate that requirement so i thought that it also
106incorporated just folks gaining certifications and things to work in a private environment so we would probably have to fall back on that too because i don't really put square footage what exactly do we have to do now is we have to go back and look at that north end school and say because i always thought that we were i know we were talking about this option but i haven't always in the back of my mind um the game plan was to play the darcy yeah darcy progress up yeah you know you're just ahead of your time because the the group the group was thinking you know like is this is this an option uh highland thing is it an option is it cost effective is it logistically effective and at least at first glance the
107answer seems to be pretty clear though right um and so i think you know so we're just it's an exercise to just close that option just to make sure you know we did not leave i mean we could do less conditioning for thailand that's that's part of what we would evaluate right with slam yeah is this just you know i'm super partial to these programs whatever you guys [Music] yeah i always say that the program itself is befitting you know resources and a facility that matches the quality of the work that's done there and right now they're about the scale way out of them right sorry you haven't done it oh no i i to say as the representative of darcy's school i have uh toured rca i think three or four times um and
108yeah that's the one thing that they always stress is the continuity of the program that the the kids who who use that program it's important not only to have all the resources there but to have them with a lot of the needs that they have to have that familiarity with the location as well as as they progress through the program that they think that that adjustment part can kind of be taken off the table uh so that they can achieve that development that that the program is really um trying to achieve so to i think to have those programs in one location is probably better for the program and i think probably the north end sounds like the best place for the arts yeah so we're just finalizing that i think with slr what that
109would look like and then you know we have to look at the dollars that if we were to try and do something at home one of the points that uh shuffling drowning days have passed is the fact that with the space being added on finally the parking lot will likely have to be significantly reconfigured and many times when you do that you have to bring all the lock the water runoff everything up to the current standard which would be a dramatic impact on cost too not to mention the fact that we just really don't have a lot of parking lot space there to maneuver anywhere um let alone some of it up and try and snake the parking lot around the back of the building further so but we will look at the costs there
110it looks like it's also just it's just going to look like urban sprawl right now it doesn't make any sense yeah when we we did our our analysis on this with the smc you know we didn't we weren't using this picture when we're analyzing we're purely looking at a calculation of the spreadsheet and what what this does this is real this really shows that there's really not a whole lot of room in there you know um you know because the space standard for 780 was about 96 000 square feet and this building is 106 so by the numbers you should fit right you know when you look at the calculation but we look at this in a real plan view every building obviously is unique the the the classroom widths are unique and those all
111all your white spaces are pretty much supports you know administrative or support you know back of house custodial bathrooms corridors that's where we look at this and go oh it really can't fit right and the picture's worth a thousand words so that's what we didn't do during smc is this exercise here now as we revolve it and go through iterations now we're fine-tuning going okay never seen a clear picture and this is what the state would look at as well and going okay what does your building really look like and we show them this they go where are you going to put it at i guarantee that probably i mean we've talked about the cafeteria under size of the building as it is so introducing a whole nother what's the first one trade take place
112there nines will be in the corner yeah we've had lunch as the kids walk in we'd have to give them lunch anything outside of school conversation youtube baby oh okay um so with uh that being said about the um special education at darcy um what are we going to do about the hummuston part since we were going to use space or the thought was there was going to be space used at the uh the north side to to sort of help with the hummus building is that as my understanding there's at least some money in the budget to account for that but as like a phase 1a or whatever um does that mean that still there will be little tougher just as the project goes along we'll have to consider some alternate solutions for that
113i mean the way i understand is replace all their value for hummus in school somewhere or the programs within schools somewhere but not necessarily right and uh we've met with the esteemed economic development coordinator and um are looking at some alternatives um and even you know chuck mentioned at one of the town meetings the idea of even breaking it up to the point where the school itself the educational component is at perhaps at cheshire high school with you know a separate building with the uh administrative component the internet itself so we've looked at a couple of different options there we're continuing to pursue those options okay thanks sorry well this goes along with that has anyone considered um what is it like 9 million 12 million dollars that is the placeholder amount for has anyone
114discussed what putting nine million dollars into uh chapman yes we have discussed that as an option because there were very i came about so much smaller numbers yeah yeah we and we've talked about some of that um that's part of our considerations when we look at a full around of options and trying to be very creative as we approach that problem uh creative related space money locations things like that so yeah that's definitely a consideration and it is um just to add to it rental property is it possible to write in a long-term lease particularly for the administrative components if we're not doing the students like the gym and other spaces like that probably needs a little bit more right it's harder to find their level like that okay so my question simply had to
115do with what i raised with you guys earlier and that is what is going on with pricing and inflation and i am really concerned about it yeah especially with that story out of torrington um so what what do we do about it how do what are you guys anticipating whose responsibility is the town councils or is it ours yeah um yeah that's all i saw i think some four dots so right now obviously um what we're seeing is um uh i don't even know if it's the peak but it's probably the most volatile that we've seen so far i mean we were seeing it when cold we first started we were in the midst of finishing projects and we were fortunate we had all our materials in place and we were able to get through
116it with minimal impact now it's getting to the point we're working on some roofing projects in multiple districts where um you know materials applied and we've all you know it's kind of fun we're going to months before it got into the news material supply we already seen it um but roofing materials are out eight ten months we're we're just we're putting out for bid some roofing projects for summer 23 expecting them not to even be able to come in um but as far as pricing goes we just spit out um the last project in south windsor um those bids came approximately eight ten percent over our budget um the some of our packages we put out were just they we were doing fine all of a sudden when we got hit with our another run
117packages coming in and we're over bit drywall steel is up that increase from just april and june to now um so it's really volatile and frankly it's um a challenge we've been incorporating three and a half four percent compounded interest for many years has been consistent i'm not sure where to put on that right now one of i think it's the responsibility i think grumpy falls probably mostly with town council investment but i think there's got to be a collective discussion with the stakeholders including really the state of connecticut too because they're seeing this around obviously saw torrential the what we don't want to do is build a budget that looks so fat the taxpayers know you're overbuilt right you're overcompensating i think that's always as someone recommends these budgets to district that's always a
118concern because we're one frankly we're a consultant right we're we're paid to work in this project so we don't want to over budget but we don't want to underplay it too so where's the sweet spot one of the strategies that i would uh recommend that we used in a previous district for hazardous materials is a signing even within the referendum a specific amount of contingency that's a own and we haven't discussed with town council so forgive me if we want if anybody is do you put aside a lot of money in the referendum that the town council holds as a contingency so that if say we go to bids and it's over we can go back to town council here here's what's going on here's our bids here's our estimates we value it we've done
119everything we can to keep this within budget we're still over budget can we borrow some of that money and maybe top council can they can hold it if we don't need it it just doesn't get borrowed that's just one idea and you know that i was thinking of so that when when these numbers come out these letters come out there's not so over inflated and the next thing you know we're coming back to normal and now we have all this excess money and the perception is oh we're over building some taj mahal some fancy school it's finding that right balance so we're in a very very challenging time phase right now on these these budgets to build them i think when we get to selecting options to win the expect because that's a strong driver
120well drafted what we think and i think it's got to be an open conversation with with everyone to go um how can we best mitigate if this thing continues how can we mitigate um the project we don't want the project to build from being over bid we don't want to go back out the referendum that's just very hard to do it's expensive but there's fatigue and taxpayers like well why don't we look you're asking the same questions you're asking why do we account for it um so i think we need to talk with everybody what are some of the best ways we can account for it but also protect the taxpayers and assure them that we're not going to overspend we're going to properly budget for it but realizing some of the stuff's out of
121our control i mean i just got a call today they're better understand um i can't even get my pricing from my supplier they might have to withdraw the next better is 500 000 higher yeah and it's like it's it's like kidding me like we're ready to sign a contract so what is the standard consistency percentage typically that you would propose on the project and then given the inflation for these crimes yeah so yeah so i'll give you so i'll give you the north school i got the budget right in front of me so we do like a high low probable so i'm just gonna give it a high range so the total project um on the high rate is roughly 64 million with what we shared with smc um within that um and we have
122stock bus and hard costs but of that uh four million of it is almost contingency okay um that's just contingency but the inflation and this is this is i don't want to get too too technical but um we had estimated um our construction budget was is 50 million dollars of that escalating out four years was 6.4 million dollars just for escalation at three and a half percent compounded to four years we get to the midpoint of construction so six million dollars just in escalation for every three and a half percent compounded on four years uh from a mark from march of eight of march of this year out to um i think it's 20 20 uh four years so for 2025 roughly uh for that is when we would you know what we're incorporating into
123the construction budget so um yeah someone say 6.4 million that's a lot of dollars right well when you're escalating in times like this uh should it be six percent seven percent when the numbers start so if you know that number that percentage you're in the wrong room that's what i say i knew that i'm in the wrong room i'm in the wrong business if i can predict that um just being very honest about it there our estimators are absolutely befuddled right now we're doing estimates on projects and we're trying to figure out what's what's the right number to carry it to tell the owner what this budget's going to be all are you know we've been lucky in the south window program we did three projects all were within budget luckily we saved them over
124three million dollars collectively with those three this one came over by that so we're hopefully gonna be able to use some of those you know to supplement it um but if you're only doing one off project or two-off when you get that money so i think it's a collective discussion um to say what it should be right now i think would be irresponsible we have to kind of manage and watch how this economy goes and supply materials i don't think it's going to be resolved in the next six months i think it's going to probably be a good 10 to 12 months depending happens it could be great um these different variants are coming out but we have a lot of professionals in the industry that we pull in construction managers architects and the state
125of connecticut has a lot of you know we have a lot of data we can pull to hopefully come up with a reasonable solution but it's not all just in the private budget maybe a referendum like i said i'm just proposing one option maybe do we do a set aside that town council owns it's in their opinion we gotta go hey we need some of that to move forward and that's just one yeah my other concern too is labor because they are talking about um increases in state workers salaries and we're doing prevailing wage and we're seeing in fact another five percent there does that that could that could definitely potentially impact i mean we get labor wage rates for many many projects and i haven't seen over the years really big spikes they don't
126increase but we'll i mean we can go and i can final prevailing wage rates for a project right now and go what are they doing compared so laborers but i think it's more than materials obviously and we've been hearing that um just against supply is the issue and um and then also the actual time frame our schedules we have to keep in mind too um because global schedule now i probably build it more on the fat side because of the delivery of these and what's important is what do we do when we want to open that school what fall do we want to open it if we're running real tight you know i said we haven't gotten until that fall of 2025 we went looking fall 2026 because of roofing materials um we're having problems
127with jim and the big joy see the long stance we're having to look at alternative ways of manufacturing those right now in order to meet schedule um we release early packages to get steel going concrete sites so we're using every strategy we can with our partners on the project to mitigate schedule mitigate costs uh we're getting really creative right now to to meet these so um i i don't think there's one silver bullet for this i think it's going to be open dialogue with all stakeholders and being realistic you know of what's going on here but also having some safeguards of against overspray because we're in this debt i think what's happening when we get the other side we're going to look back when we hopefully will have excess money we can maybe shed some
128back and not borrow that and say taxpayers you know the money so i think also faith that uh with regards to torrents and the other piece of that puzzle was the uh enrollment huge spike he had a lot of the you know people coming from new york and the influx there and that impacted the just the footprint of the school i can buy 30 000 square feet so you have to take that and multiply that by the cost per square foot 365 we talked about earlier that you know was also another factor so that's why the demographic piece that slam would be providing is so critical too up front to understand what that right side is this one actually just goes back to as i'm looking at their map there's a lot of vegetation and
129trees that are is there embedded costs to replant you know in states probably talking about norton primarily it's about primarily more yeah so um [Music] law that i'm aware of i don't know no no we try to look at in some cases on the one we're just fitting um there's a beautiful large shirt at the back when we did the serving we saw the surveyor you know anything that's um you know 18 inches in caliber or whatever you know to specifically survey that one so that we can see where the build is and maybe we can work around so we saved this one trade because it's going to be used for outdoor classrooms and it's it's beautiful you just can't get those anymore so um it is taking into account um clients i'm going to
130be involved but also our landscape architects we want to let them go build a just a comment on the trees that those concerns you know a little bit farther away i if i recall a test fit had at least 100 foot setback uh from the uh former property so i don't know how much how many feet that is currently uh from from the property lines but i know it was at least 100 feet uh for the test it's a pretty big site you know when you're looking on a piece of paper this big it doesn't look as big but it's it's a it's a good-sized parcel back there and i think i think lots are deep too all the lots on what's the street right yeah sharon mormont you had mentioned something about the possibility
131of pushing opening out the fall 2026 does that mean that we would have to is that are we getting into trailer territory at that point for one year and don't take that as gospel i'm just trying to i don't know but you know worst case you know it was you know we're talking packing on another million dollars for trailer rentals for a year or something like that for the overflow because that's when we start peaking right is uh 12 20 25 and you're saying you can't store the roof job we're talking about two whole schools yeah and we're hoping obviously we're all delights when we get to this this thing is resolved yeah you know if we're learning these things we want to make sure we educate everybody this is the stuff we're dealing with
132out hopefully it goes away but that's the challenge we have right now and and i don't say it to scare anybody or to to be an alarmist just it's just the reality of some of the things and hopefully again hopefully you know the clog in the piping system right now hopefully it clears and things start flowing again and these are all conversations right fingers crossed you're about a year and a half to two years from starting construction too so let's hope [Applause] how far are you locking contracts just in general 12 months or do you go beyond that no so when we go to bed and we go out to bed they have to hold their bits [Music] but once we sign a contract with a gmp that we call the internet with a contractor
133those prices are locked in now the reality is they're coming back on their roof and guys like oh the installations go up another eight percent um it's a number right now i've never i've never seen this in my years and um like the roofing jobs what you know they put a bid and we said okay we're ready to go oh by the way we're going to increase right when we think six eight percent okay the owner's like well should they win well if he's only gonna own it they're gonna back out and say you know keep my bid i'm not i'm not going to get hurt i'm not going to take the risk um but so understand i got to get this roof done so we're saying well let's do a live suggestion let's go
134open the book here mr contractor if you want to keep the job you want to stay in business we want to get a job done we got to work together here so show us what you carried in your bid and i suggested you show us those numbers now so that there is an increase you give us that document we take the delta we give you 10 on top when we just today and they're like well if there's you know kind of what you're talking comes up we you know we want to reserve the rag get rid of it so in terms of like steel or concrete or anything that's you know three or four years out you're locking in that contract for those years and in this in a normal world that's more stable whether
135in the process it's the it's the products down the line that uh you know what we try to get but if there's a challenge that we try to procure as quickly as we can bring them outside the store that's that's hopefully so here here's my question then um is there a benefit from purchasing perspective or from any other perspective i guess that you can proceed in terms of let's say a march referendum versus a november referendum because it seems to me that if we do a referendum say in march and it passes then you go to oscgr on june 30th they're probably getting back to us sometime before november i'm thinking probably july or august they would come back with some sort of decision like if we're going about the priority list we're going to
136proceed with you with an agreement and you're going to get an agreement from us to get reimbursement yeah that's probably october october okay so forget about the november point oh wait so either way we go to them in june they're coming back to us in october priority list we know if we have a grant application december 15 they just finished their list yesterday and we will unless so if you're if you're building 100 000 square foot building i mean i'm assuming you know 80 of the raw materials you're going to need regardless of what changes happen no not yet no no no really no the specifications are develop through design yeah you i know you're saying hey we pre-purchased epdm and roof insulation for now we couldn't do it that really well and then okay
137okay and then if you locked in and then in prices then we look like idiots we're holding this really expensive roofing i'm just saying if we're concerned about it you want to avoid volatility my simple question was can you lock in if you know that you're in the wrong room again yeah no i don't know what's gonna happen i'm just saying no well that's the thing is we don't either it's too hard to predict that far out to make a purchase that you know that that may go up or down we just have to manage it through the design process and then we estimate three different times that we you know we have our partner skill okay what's going on what's going on and we're we're adjusting for that okay yeah yeah you're just saying
138we [Music] um have any questions who made the motion i did in here